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There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
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But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
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I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
— Margaret Atwood (via pavorst)
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There is no such thing as empty space or an empty time.
— John Cage
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Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
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Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human’s life is a beautiful mess.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere (via concocted)
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I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
— Martin Buber
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What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
— Carl Sagan  (via fleurishes)
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Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
— Christopher Morley
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Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
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