"I like flaws and feel more comfortable around people who have them. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. "
— Augusten Burroughs (Magical Thinking: True Stories)

"“I do my thing and you do yours. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.”"
— Fritz Perls

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are times I wish I were invisible. Which is silly, since I do everything I can to stand out.
"
— Gena Showalter (Oh My Goth)

"...I privately say to you, old friend... please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of early-blooming parentheses: (((())))."
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

"It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up."
— Frank O'Hara (Meditations in an Emergency)

"I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"Because you believed I was capable of behaving decently, I did."
— Paulo Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation)

"What you seek is seeking you."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."
— Paulo Coelho

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."
— Sylvia Plath

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— Sylvia Plath

"Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
— Sylvia Plath

"No day is safe from news of you."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name."
— Kate DiCamillo (The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread)

""My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens: men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain fields down yonder? [...] The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back to the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wheat in the wind..." "
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for...

"They don't find it," I answered.

"And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..."

"Of course," I answered.

And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart." "
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . ."

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"Then it has done you no good at all!"

"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields." "
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"'I am looking for friends. What does that mean -- tame?'

'It is an act too often neglected,' said the fox. 'It means to establish ties.'

'To establish ties?'

'Just that,' said the fox. 'To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world...'"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince)

"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you..."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince - Le Petit Prince)

"I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings." -from the Fox-"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (El Principito / The Little Prince)

"Many of you have forgotten this truth
but you must never forget it:
you remain responsible, forever,
for what you have tamed."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"They never say to you, 'What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?' Instead, they demand 'How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?' Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her..."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"'You are not at all like my rose,' he said. 'As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.'

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

'You are beautiful, but you are empty,' he went on. 'One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.'"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence."
— David Byrne

"After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?"
— Frank O'Hara (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara)

"There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life."
— Frank O'Hara

"When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last."
— Frank O'Hara

"...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it..."
— Frank O'Hara (Lunch Poems)

"We sit and talk quietly,
with long lapses of silence,
and I am aware of the stream that has no language,
coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech."
— William Carlos Williams

"In summer, the song sings itself."
— William Carlos Williams

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible. "
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would stll be on their way south, the deers would be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be YOU. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that exactly. You'd just be different that's all... I mean you'd be different in some way- I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it. -Holden"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"But what I mean is, lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most. I mean you can’t help it sometimes."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was, in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces, a stunning and final girl.

--Down by the Dinghy"
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

""I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. . . Are you listening to me?"
"Yes."
You could tell he was trying to concentrate and all.
"It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?""
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)