“Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.”

— Franz Kafka (via ugh)

(Source: paperbackwords, via ugh)

2:09 pm  1,139 notes

“For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel.”

— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (via largely-quotes)

(via largely-quotes-deactivated20130)

6:21 pm  7 notes

“Where did it go? It was like there had been a lot of food on a plate in front of us, and we ate it all really quickly, and then there was nothing left. Maybe that’s how couples stay together: they’re not greedy. They know that what they have in front of them has to last a long time, so they kind of pick at it. i hope it’s not like that, though. I hope that when people are happy together, it feels as though someone keeps piling seconds and thirds on their plates.”

— Nick Hornby, Slam (via thephoneticspelling)

(via largely-quotes-deactivated20130)

4:09 pm  9 notes

“Sometimes she seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, of course, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close. Her eyes were astoundingly blue and astoundingly sharp. Nothing escaped her. She saw everything, and since most of what there is to see in the world is painful, she often lived in pain.”

— Erica Jong, Remembering Anne Sexton  (via commovente)

(via commovente)

10:28 am  3,330 notes

“Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. We all wish for world peace, but world peace will never be acheived unless we first establish peace within our own minds. We can send so-called ‘peacekeeping forces’ into areas of conflict, but peace cannot be opposed from the outside with guns. Only by creating peace within our own mind and helping others to do the same can we hope to achieve peace in this world.”

— Geshe Kelsang Gyatso  (via wethinkwedream)

(Source: ageofreason, via wethinkwedream)

11:53 pm  241 notes

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

— George Orwell, 1984  (via wethinkwedream)

(Source: larmoyante, via wethinkwedream)

12:55 am  11,764 notes

“You swallowing matches and suddenly I’m yelling Strike me. Strike anywhere.”

— Richard Siken, from “Wishbone” (via pigmenting)

(via memereve)

2:40 pm  528 notes

“

We know this type of person well from literature, probably because so many writers are sensitive introverts themselves. He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances. “The troubles of others moved him more, as did also the teeming beauty of life: moved him, compelled him, to seize a pen and write about them. [He was moved by] walking in the hills, listening to a Schubert impromptu, watching nightly from his armchair the smashing of bone and flesh that made up so much of the nine o’clock news.”

The description of such characters as thin-skinned is meant metaphorically, but it turns out that it’s actually quite literal. Among the tests researchers use to measure personality traits are skin conductance tests, which record how much people sweat in response to noise, strong emotions, and other stimuli. High-reactive introverts sweat more; lower-reactive extroverts sweat less. Their skin is literally “thicker,” more impervious to stimuli, cooler to the touch. In fact, according to some of the scientists I spoke to, this is where our notion of being socially “cool” comes from; the lower-reactive you are, the cooler your skin, the cooler you are.

”

— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking (via commovente)

9:58 pm  276 notes

“If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.”

— Jamie Anne Royce (via wethinkwedream)

(Source: exulis, via wethinkwedream)

7:34 pm  5,672 notes

“I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”

— Augusten Burroughs, Dry (via left-nut)

(via virtualash)

4:11 am  86 notes