Seagreen

Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there. - Eckhart Tolle

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning. - Haruki Murakami

Sometimes people say terrible things when they’re scared. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it. They lash out because if they can see that their words hurt someone else, it makes them feel as if they aren’t completely powerless. - Jonathan Maberry

Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

“When people start liking people, that’s when someone has the ability to get hurt.” -  Lauren Barnholdt, Two-Way Street

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.” - Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays

All my life, I’ve found it difficult to advocate for myself, to ask for what I want. I fear burdening people so much. - Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive

“Thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound.” - Juan Gabriel Vásquez

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you… It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions – predigested books and ideas… Marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short… And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that w

“I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.” - Elie Wiesel

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy. - Beartown by Frederick Backman

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar. - Cornelia Funke

Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.

I've just always loved books, and I love the idea that we're all just really made of stories. I do also like the idea that anyone can love books. Books don't care how educated you are or what you do for a living. - Markus Zusak

So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be. - Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“That’s it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not.” - Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms. - Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

I suppose in the end it’s almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things. What’s harder - what’s much, much harder - is to accept what you actually did do. - Peter Hook

She seemed fragile like a moonflower – destined to bloom for a single lovely night, and then to fade and fall. - Juliet Marillier

I’m still writing about you and you haven’t read a word. - Travis Grandt

I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep. - Gregory David Roberts

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” - Albert Einstein