“We welcome risk when we’re young, we avoid risk when we’re older. People, companies, governments: only a determined few break this pattern.” ~Jack Dorsey

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.” ~Norton Juster

“I love this part. This is the part where your heart races a bit, your stomach feels like it’s free floating, and your face has a slight smile on it that can’t be wiped off. This is the part where things are about to get really good, and you know they’re about to get really good, and sometimes that’s more satisfying than when you get whatever it is you’re waiting for.” ~Scarlett Schmaus

“Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets.
So, love the people who treat you right and forget about the ones who don’t.
And believe that everything happens for a reason.
If you get a chance, take it; if it changes your life, let it.
Nobody said that it would be easy.
They just promised it would be worth it.”

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
~The Rival, Sylvia Plath

“The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways — a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind’s mathematics. Love’s lengthways splits the heart in two — the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split in two?” ~Jeanette Winterson

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.” ~James Joyce

“I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog.” ~The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicket

“I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved.” ~Shana Abé

“I love to sit in silence
Beneath the shady trees
And listen to the song of birds
And to the buzz of bees.

I love to sit in silence
And watch the Clouds roll by
Then read a book or sing a song
And hear the wild bird cry.

I love to sit in silence
When the day is almost done
And see behind the distant hill
The paint glow of the sun.

I love to sit in silence
In the evening twilight
And listen to the whippor-will
Singing with all its might

I love to sit in silence
Beneath the Starry sky
And pray to all in earnest
To live in silence all the while.”