The flames and smoke climbed out of every window / And disappeared with everything that you held dear / You shed not a single tear for the things that you didn't need / 'Cause you knew you were finally free
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
—Agatha Christie
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A great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, “I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”
—Looing for Alaska, John Green
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You can kiss your family and friends goodbye and put miles between you and them, but at the same time you can carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world, but a world lives in you.
—Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner
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Know thyself.
—Ancient Greek aphorism
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So are the memories. They cannot be found in any history book. But they contain the lessons of life, the things the history books don’t tell you. The only things worth having. To live and to laugh. To love God as no other, for He makes everything right. To find fault with no one and to do your best. This is all that matters. I have lived and laughed. I have prayed and grieved. I have birthed children and have watched them grow. Through it all, I learned. I learned to accept with good grace what God gave me. I learned that all dreams count for something. Big dreams or little ones. Let your effort be true, and the rewards will be sweet. Like the bees, you must go from flower to flower, in wind or rain. In sun or snow. You must stay busy. Work hard. And love. I have known scorn and ridicule and hatred. I have also known love. And let me tell you, my darling, love is better. Always.
—Lesia’s Dream, Laura Langston
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It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are far more than our abilities.
—Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Chambers of Secrets
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What I’ve found out is there is beauty in the ‘figuring out’. I hope I never have life figured out for myself. I want to be in a constant state of learning and growing, and I hope God can always show me that from the bottom, there are just more ways to look up.
—Hayley Williams
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If anything matters then everything matters. Because you are important, everything you do is important. Everytime you forgive, the universe changes; everytime you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes. With every kindness and service, seen or unseen, God’s purpose are accomplished & nothing will ever be the same again.
—The Shack, William Young
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Love, like a mountain-wind upon an oak falling upon me, shakes me leaf and bough. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep. The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.
—Romeo and Juliet (Act II Scene II), William Shakespeare
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If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world.
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Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
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Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
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Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him.
But I knew they would hurt him.
So I buried them and let them hurt me.
~
I am doing something I hate for you. This is what it means to be in love.
—Jonathan Safran Froer
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Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
—John Keats
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Fearless is not the absence of fear. It’s not being completely unafraid. To me, fearless is living inspite of those things that scare you to death. Fearless is getting back up and fighting for what you want over and over again…even though everytime you’ve tried before, you’ve lost. It’s fearless to have faith that someday things will change. Fearless is having the courage to say goodbye to someone who only hurts you, even if you can’t breathe without them. I think loving someone despite what people think is fearless. Letting go is fearless. Then, moving on and being alright that’s fearless too. But no matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it. You have to believe in love stories & prince charmings & happily ever afters. That’s why I write these songs, because I think love is fearless.
—Taylor Alison Swift
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If there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not deter or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.
—William Penn
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We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later…Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
—Mary Antin
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Barefoot or first thing in the morning I feel beautiful because I feel like me. I didn’t always feel that way, but I feel that way now. When somebody just loves you, and when you make somebody happy, when your presence seems to make them happy, you suddenly feel like the most beautiful person in the world.
—Angelina Jolie
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God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
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We are what we believe we are.
—C.S Lewis
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To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
—E.E Cummings
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Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.
—Lemony Snicket
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
—Thomas Merton
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Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways. Where it is unwilling, it will find a thousand excuses.
—Arlen Price
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But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery, but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self concerned, too visonary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
—Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
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