“Do not yearn to be popular; be exquisite. Do not desire to be famous; be loved. Do not take pride in being expected; be palpable, unmistakable.”
“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”
“I was used to being invisible. People rarely saw me, and if they did, they never looked close. I wasn t shiny and charming like my brother, stunning and graceful like my mother, or smart and dynamic like my friends. That s the thing, though. You always think you want to be noticed. Until you are.”
“We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.”
“Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death.”
“I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing”
“All our wisdom is stored in the trees.”
“I find no importance in showing others that I am happy; it s not important to me that they know or think that I am happy but what is important to me is that I am happy. I am interested in being happy, not in making others think or know that I am.”
“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.”
“You can live your whole life not realising that what you re looking for is right in front of you.”
“No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.”
“Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”
“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”
“There are two types of people on planet Earth, Batman and Iron Man. Batman has a secret identity, right? So Bruce Wayne has to walk around every second of every day knowing that if somebody finds out his secret, his family is dead, his friends are dead, everyone he loves gets tortured to death by costumed supervillains. And he has to live with the weight of that secret every day. But not Tony Stark, he s open about who he is. He tells the world he s Iron Man, he doesn t give a shit. He doesn t have that shadow hanging over him, he doesn t have to spend energy building up those walls of lies around himself. You re one or the other - either you re one of those people who has to hide your real self because it would ruin you if it came out, because of your secret fetishes or addictions or crimes, or you re not one of those people. And the two groups aren t even living in the same universe.”
“Why do we always begin to think about people when they die? I think we should think about people while they re still alive! That way, they can know that we re thinking about them! I always tell people when I m thinking about them, or that I thought about them, or that I have been thinking about them and it almost always scares them away, but so what, I am practicing the art of life and if that is frightening to them then maybe they need to start living while they re still alive!”
“Just remain in the center; watching. And then forget that you are there.”
“It s like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back in again and the moment I m back in, it just keeps on going and going again...all of this, so I can find things out and then I write about the things I find out so you can find them out from me. All the bruises, all the wounds, all the bumps on the head, all the scars, just so I can take that and I can write all these things, and sometimes I say God, I don t want to be in this roller coaster anymore. But when I think about it, if I m not right here, then where the hell would I be? On the sidewalk? I wasn t born to stand on the sidewalk, I was born to fly around crazy in the sky!”