And in these next 50 years you will eat so many delicious meals, laugh so many times with so many people you love, shout and scream and sing and cry and smile so hard your face hurts. And you will see such beautiful sunsets and feel fresh cold air on your face and feel warm and safe wrapped up in your favourite winter coat.

Amy Hempel, "Cloudland", Sing to It

one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it

Think about it this way: if you wish you never met him, you would have probably also not met his family. Or his friends. You would have probably stayed home a lot more. Friends you made at nights out wouldn’t exist. You would probably weight a little less, but, would that really make you happier?

You can’t erase people from your life. If they were a part of it, anywhere on your timeline, you should enbrace it.

no i dont think women starving themselves and reconstructing their entire faces with makeup and plastic surgery is feminism and female empowerment

I don’t expect nothing from nobody, but I do pay attention to how people move when it comes to me.

je was misschien niet de liefde van mijn leven. en misschien was ik ook niet de jouwe. maar er was een tijd dat we dat wel van elkaar waren. en je naam is misschien niet zo belangrijk meer voor me. en mijn naam ben je waarschijnlijk al half vergeten. maar er waren dagen dat je naam het enige woord was dat uit mijn mond kwam. en ik heb nu meerdere vervangingen gevonden voor jouw aanrakingen. en er bestaat een kans dat jij iedere week een ander in je bed hebt liggen. maar er was een tijd dat alleen jouw aanraking mijn lichaam kon laten tintelen.

the years by alex dimitrov

“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.”

— Anaïs Nin

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910 (Norton, 1945) (via ilyakaminsky)

little by little i will save my life and the rot in my stomach will swell into something sweet and it’ll sit on my tongue and i will think to myself how silly it is to wallow when there is a sun that shines and hands that reach for other hands. little by little i will remember every vessel in me bears the promise that most sweet things shall stay alive for as long as i live alongside them. little by little i will leave my head for the real world and i will fearlessly dangle my feet on tall grass and without hesitance reach for a star knowing with absolute certainty that i can never hold it close or call it mine and that it’ll never love me back or yearn for me half as much. so here we are, me and my hope, and our only means of staying tethered together which is through the little by the little. little by little i will save my life not as some monumental course-altering endeavour of bigness and bravery and prettyness like in the poems… but by simply putting my life in warm clothes.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

– Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

I used to build dreams about you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If you knew how hard it was, and how long it took, to rebuild my little universe of peace and happiness then you would understand why I’m so picky about who I allow in my life.”

— Weird People

— Clarice Lispector, from Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“And when I asked you how you’d been, I meant I missed you more than I’ve ever missed anything before.”

— Iain Thomas

Woman, Eat Me Whole, Ama Asantewa Diaka