all the little beagles

“I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

— The Ice Palace, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quiet young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older.”

—bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, Ch.1 

thebonepalaceballet:

“Maybe that’s why it gave me a curious feeling of hope to look at the sky, to try to feel its magnitude. It was proof that there was much more out there somewhere.”

—Augusten Burroughs - “A Wolf at the Table” (via boo-bookittyfuck)

“I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core on non-feeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and to think, to think and live, to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love."

—Sylvia Plath

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

—Anaïs Nin

“I actually attack the concept of happiness. I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.”

—Hugh Mackay

“When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.”

—Rumi

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”

—Charles Dickens

“The beauty of things must be that they end.”

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa 

“I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live.”

—Oscar Wilde

“No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”

—Simone de Beauvoir

“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.”

—Albert Einstein