"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."
— Plato

"Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.

Ten True Things"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.
"
— Miranda July

"People were always saying to Margaret, "Well, Julia sings and Betsy writes. Now what is little Margaret going to do?" Margaret would smile politely, for she was very polite, but privately she stormed to Betsy with flashing eyes, "I'm not going to do anything. I want to just live. Can't people just live?""
— Maud Hart Lovelace (Betsy and Joe)

"I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is..."
— Frank O'Hara

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

"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)

"My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind.
I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open."
— Frank O'Hara

"Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."
— Arnold Lobel

"Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you'-- like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes,
he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow."
— A.A. Milne

"'Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.'"
— A.A. Milne

"Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
— A.A. Milne

"Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them."
— A.A. Milne

""But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
— Lewis Carroll

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where –"

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others"
— Lewis Carroll

"He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too."
— Lewis Carroll

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

"While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit."
— Lewis Carroll

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."
— Flannery O'Connor

"It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes."
— Flannery O'Connor

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Beneatha: Love him? There is nothing left to love.

Mama: There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. (Looking at her) Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him: what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning - because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so! when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is."
— Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun)

"And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about."
— Shane Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical)

"Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived."
— Shane Claiborne

"“I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time. It seemed there would never be another book. It was all over, the book was dead. It lay in its bent cover by my hand. What was the use? Why bother dragging the weight of my small body down to dinner? Why move? Why breathe? The book had left me, and there was no reason to go on.” "
— Marya Hornbacher

"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel)

"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame it yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"…the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Cartas A Un Joven Poeta)

"And you suddenly know: It was here!
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Selected Poems)

"A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity."
— Rainer Maria Rilke