"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better."
- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
"I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though."
- J D Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
"Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow."
- T.S. Eliot (via ontheedgeofdarkness)
(Source: wonderfulambiguity, via savoirr)
"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are ‘It might have been.’"
- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
"A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It’s as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there… is… no… key."
- Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
"Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt."
- William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh…"
- Jack Kerouac
This is one of our absolute favourite talks EVER. If you write or create and get tortured from time to time, this is an absolute must-watch.
One of my favourite talks by the endearing writer Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity - the process of creating it, maintaining it, and its worldly pressures. Her take on being called ‘a genius’ rather than ‘having a genius’ is “like asking somebody to swallow the sun.” Eloquent.
"I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."
- Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)
"All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
- Ernest Hemingway
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."
- Mark Twain
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
- Voltaire
"Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once."
- William Shakespeare (Julius Ceasar)
We wholeheartedly agree with the wise J.R.R Tolkien.
