What makes an experience worthwhile? Is it the quality of the experience as it’s happening, or as it’s remembered?
—Joshua Rothman
The hardest thing you will ever do, will be not doing something.
—I Wrote This For You
But you are important. You are important in a way that many people will never acknowledge, because they are too consumed with their image in the mirror or their voice on a recording to notice that they share the world with people around them. But you are important because you are good, because you look at your surroundings with tenderness and understanding. You don’t step on flowers when you walk, you allow a housepet to come to your hand instead of roughly insisting on your touch, you leave messages and wait for people to call you back at their convenience. You treat people with respect, and so rarely ask it for yourself. But you should. Because you matter. You matter to me, you matter to the woman you held the elevator for, and you matter to the friend you listened to while they unloaded the problems the world had put on them. You are more important than you will ever know, and never let anyone tell you that your economy of words is a stinginess of character. You are overflowing with love, and we can see it from a mile away.
I love you — I’m not afraid to admit that, even if it isn’t reciprocated — but I love myself more. And I must start taking care of the things I love.
—Charlotte Green, Don’t Tell Me You Love Me (via creatingaquietmind)
(Source: larmoyante, via creatingaquietmind)
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.
—Anne Lamott (via creatingaquietmind)
(Source: strangerains, via teachingliteracy)
Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.
—The Winter of the Air. (via maddywirtz)
(via wrists)
Cecelia Ahern, If You Could See Me Now
Submitted by icexdiamond.
(via teachingliteracy)
It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.
—“Bittersweet” by Shauna Niequist (via kari-shma)
(via quote-book)
