I really like words, y'all.
So here are a bunch of really nice ones, in something hopefully like alphabetical order.
"I think there are still fairies, and that they will save us. An ideal to live and fight for, that is a fairy."
- Maude Adams, in an interview
"People get built different. We don't need to figure it out, we just need to respect it."
- Adventure Time
"Men are born for the sake of each other so either teach or tolerate."
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"While you live, while you can, be good."
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important."
- James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin
"I hope that someday, somebody wants to hold you for twenty minutes straight, and that's all they do. They don't pull away. They don't look at your face. They don't try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms, without an ounce of selfishness in it."
- Sara Bareilles, Waitress
"Make art. Make rent. Help others do the same."
- Scott Benson
"Your name is humming in my chest. I think this is what it means to be in love. I think this is what it means to be living."
- Emma Bleker, i am a grand, living, buzzing thing
"The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees."
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
"The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible."
- Toni Cade Bambara
"Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, 'What road do I take?' The cat asked, 'Where do you want to go?' 'I don’t know,' Alice answered. 'Then,' said the cat, 'it really doesn’t matter, does it?'"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
"Everybody wants to leave something behind them, some impression, some mark upon the world. And then you think, you've left a mark on the world if you just get through it and a few people remember your name. Then you've left a mark. You don't have to bend the world. I think it's better just to enjoy it.
- Dorian Corey, Paris is Burning
"I was date-raped in grade ten by a popular boy at school. Let's say his name was Kevin and he was a basketball player. Neither of these things are true, but let's say them anyway. Let's protect him even to this day, because this is what we do. We protect him as a means of protecting ourselves."
- Ivan Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide
"You have made a wonderful alteration in my life. You have made me human."
- Paul Dirac, to his wife Marci
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit -- all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."
- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices
"When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I learned to survive through everything."
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."
- Lesie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
"You can't leave a storyteller only half-dead, though. Not without becoming a part of the stories they tell.
- Lori Fox, This Has Always Been A War
"Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe."
- Andrea Gibson
"And if you missed a day, there was always the next, and if you missed a year, it didn't matter, the hills weren't going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit"
- Louise Gluck, Sunrise
"That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today and I love you. My cold is better and I love you. Say hello to Horse and I love you."
- William Goldman, The Princess Bride
"No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you."
- Matt Haig, The Humans
"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet."
- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Mine
"We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing."
- bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
"But then it passed, as all things do."
- Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
"I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.
- Marie Howe, What the Living Do
"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."
- Langston Hughes
"It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent--lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It's as simple as that."
- Tove Jansson, Fair Play
"I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!"
- Tove Jansson, The Moomins
"Do you know the difference between the first love and the last? It's this: you always think the first is the last and the last is the first."
- Tove Jansson, The Moomins
- Julian K. Jarboe
"Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual."
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
"What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremnoy that makes a home."
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
"We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us."
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
- The Last Unicorn
"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
"Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
"The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We're drawn in -- or out -- and the windows of our perception are cleansed."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
"Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us. That's why we have to care about each other."
- David Leviathan, Every Day
"Now, I demand a love that is stupid and beautiful, like a pilot turning off her engines mid-flight to listen for rain on wings."
- Paige Lewis, "Pavlov was the Son of a Priest"
"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."
- Audre Lorde, New Year's Day
". . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."
- Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury
"Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking."
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
"If no art makes you feel anything, make your own and feel something."
- Jenna Marbles
"When people say you cannot love others until you love yourself, they fundamentally misunderstand love. Nothing thrives in isolation."
- Trista Mateer, Aphrodite Made Me Do It
"No one can take your story from you if you know how to wield words. Their voices may be many but yours will be honest. You have the power to right wrongs and sing truths. You still have the pen in your hand no matter what you choose to do with it."
- Trista Mateer, Aphrodite Made Me Do It
"We're all born naked, and the rest is drag."
- Tede Matthews, Word is Out
"In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe."
Jeffrey McDaniel, The Quiet World
"Hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world."
- Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway
"Being bruised doesn't make you bad, unless you're a peach, and even a bruised peach is good for making jam."
- Seanan McGuire, Lost In The Moment And Found
"It's easy to go along with a system. It's harder to create one. You have to choose it, over and over, when you're building it."
- Seanan McGuire, Lost In The Moment And Found
"If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you."
- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
"Some people care too much. I think it's called love."
- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
"Stop trying to fight by men's rules. Most rules in our world were made by the people who were/are already in power, so they often do not work in your favor if you are not in power."
- Mitski, 27 Bad Survival Tips for Artists
"Men who slowly take a sip of their drink or puff of their smoke mid-sentence are enjoying their privilege too much. Interrupt them mid-sip or puff, or walk away entirely. Don't give them that time."
- Mitski, 27 Bad Survival Tips for Artists
"Now, if you have a bra on, take it off for a moment and listen to me. Sing, shout, or scream, or simply speak, but do it from the bottom of your stomach. Vomit out your voice before you have time to think. This is what they really mean by "sing from your belly." You will die one day, sooner than you imagine, and it is incredibly sad. So scream about it."
- Mitski, 27 Bad Survival Tips for Artists
"'Dear old world', she murmured, 'you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.'
- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
"You are beautiful because you let yourself feel, and that is a brave thing indeed."
- Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being
"You and me, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
"It's finished, it's done. You can't take loved away."
- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth
"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity."
- Edvard Munch
"Every lesbian is worthy of inclusion in history. If you have the courage to touch another woman, then you are a very famous person."
- Joan Nestle
"I don't want worship. I want understanding."
- Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin: Vol 1
"I think it's a nice to be a little magical. Today we need this. All that we can read in fairy tales or books, I think somewhere it's all around us. But nowadays we can think that this magic has been killed, and I try to make it survive as long as possible . . . I want to accomplish my work and fulfil my dreams, and do something with my life, and I hope I'll be able to accomplish it. It's very much work, but I like it."
- Klaus Nomi, in an interview
"She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies--little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts--from her bag--and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend-- by now we were holding hands--had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradi- tion. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate--once the crying of confusion stopped--seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost."
- Naomi Shihab Nye, Gate A-4
- @onenhillion on twitter
"If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb."
- Mary Oliver, Don't Hesitate
"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed . . . Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."
- Mary Oliver, Evidence
"I don't want to lose a single thread from the intricate brocade of this happiness. I want to remember everything. Which is why I'm lying awake, sleepy but not sleepy enough to give it up. Just now, a moment from a year ago: the early morning light, the deft, sweet gesture of your hand reaching for me."
- Mary Oliver, I Don't Want To Lose
"Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang."
- Mary Oliver, I Worried
"Tell me you love me, he says. Tell me again. Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask it. I get to tell."
- Mary Oliver, Little Dog's Rhapsody In The Night (Percy Three)
"You could live a better life than you do, be Softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will Be able to do it."
- Mary Oliver, North Country
"Those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward."
- Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. "
- Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
"You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
- Mary Oliver
"Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives."
- Mary Oliver, Wild, Wild
"Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry."
- Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
"Everyone wants to believe they are "chosen". But if we all waited around for a prophecy to make us special, we'd die waiting. And that's why you need to choose yourself."
- The Owl House
"Never lose the childlike wonder. It's just too important. It's what drives us."
- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
- Pokemon: The First Movie
"Don't think about death; when you're ready, death will think about you."
- D.A. Powell, "Positivity"
"It is vital to remember who you really are. Its very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong."
- Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage"
- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."
- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
"What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right."
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
"Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."
- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
"Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?"
- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
- Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
"When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve."
- Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
"Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show."
- Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
"Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for."
- Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
"Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!"
- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
"Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for."
- Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
- Terry Pratchett
"Sooner or later I'll have to leave him. But, for one day at a time, let it be tomorrow."
- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
- Terry Pratchett, Diggers
"I think, in the poems, we must continually mine what it is we think we can't say, what it is we think might get us killed. Because it actually might be the thing that keeps us alive, that gives us life. Taking that risk."
- Roger Reeves
"Art is the highest form of hope."
- Gerhard Richter
"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person."
- Fred Rogers
"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."
- Carl Sagan, Contact
I believe that there's a big future out there with a lot of beautiful things."
- Octavia Saint Laurent, Paris is Burning
"someone will remember us, I say, even in another time"
- Sappho
"Art is not optional."
- Nathan Sawaya, The Art of The Brick
"May those who follow their fate be granted happiness; may those who defy it be granted glory"
- Mizuo Shinonome, Princess Tutu
"Laughter. An essential ingredient for our survival. And we laughed a lot."
Patti Smith, Just Kids.
"It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends. But you and I will always be back then."
- Rebecca Sugar, Time Adventure
"and i said to my body. softly. 'i want to be your friend.' it took a long breath. and replied 'i have been waiting my whole life for this.'"
- Nayyirah Waheed
"The present tense of regret is indecision."
- Welcome to Night Vale
"You are beautiful when you do beautiful things."
- Welcome to Night Vale
"Are we living a life that is safe from harm? Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is are we living a life that is worth the harm?"
- Welcome to Night Vale
"Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic!"
- Welcome to Night Vale
- Welcome to Night Vale
"Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible, no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind, it is impossible not to feel a little sad looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. ... ... But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment and it is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now, where we never can know what shape the next moment will take. Stay tuned for... well, let's just find out together, shall we?"
- Welcome to Night Vale
"Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us? We can cope with that. We can do this together. You and I, drowsily, but comfortably."
- Welcome to Night Vale
"What do you see in that guy?"
"He makes me laugh."
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Sometimes in life it's the only weapon we have."
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Page Credits
got the divider from this tumblr post
