Just get out and do it.

I think too much. I dance in my underwear. I like doing things society tells me not to. Some people say I need to calm down. Quite frankly, I don't care. "So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I am still trying to figure out how that could be."

[anotherprettyday]

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.

— from "The Emperor of Gladness" by Ocean Vuong

[anotherprettyday]

[anotherprettyday]

The days fall out of your pockets one after the other. Soon you'll need a new jacket with tougher leather

and seams no one has felt. Soon you'll bring the old books into your bed and sleep easy

and alone. It must be December again. This must be the part of the story where you

refuse to say how the bodies you've walked toward continue walking in you. With heavy black boots

in a calm procession of darling and honey — they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart.

— Darling by Alex Dimitrov

[anotherprettyday]

You know that feeling at the end of the day when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?

I feel like that now. Tired of the me I've always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness.

— Buddha Boy from The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders

[anotherprettyday]

I am large, I contain multitudes.

What people must realize is they're not just one single person who does weird, out of character things now and then. We're all made up of many different selves who fight and compete with one another constantly. [...] They all have different needs. One part of us wants safety, another wants adventure. I want to be loved. I want to be left alone. Those aren't contradictions - they're independent selves saying I WANT THIS.

— from The Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll

[anotherprettyday]

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

— Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

[anotherprettyday]

Interviewer: There's a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.

Joan Didion: Well every day is all there is. _______________________________

"We'll dream of a longer summer but this is the one we have I lay my sunburnt hand on your table: this is the time we have"

[anotherprettyday]

[anotherprettyday]

At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department With a summary of my findings A debrief, a detailed rewinding For the purpose of warning For the sake of reminding As you might all unfortunately recall I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity Which explains my plea here today of temporary i n s a n i t y You see, the pendulum swings Oh, the chaos it brings Leads the caged beast to do the most curious things Lovers spend years denying what’s ill fated Resentment rotting away galaxies we created Stars placed and glued meticulously by hand next to the ceiling fan Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align. And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky. Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues Then a crash from the skylight Bursting through Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new And so I was out of the oven And into the microwave Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower Swinging a sword he could barely lift But loneliness struck at that fateful hour Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips He never even scratched the surface of me. None of them did. “In summation, it was not a love affair!” I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest. A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face Because it’s the worst men that I write best. And so I enter into evidence My tarnished coat of arms My muses, acquired like bruises My talismans and charms The tick, tick, tick of love bombs My veins of pitch black ink All’s fair in love and poetry

— Sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department

[anotherprettyday]

We need to move away from this constant need of coming across as calm, cool and collected. We weren't built to be calm, cool and collected. If we were, it wouldn’t feel so fucking exhausting all the time. It would, you know, come naturally to us. You know what comes naturally to human beings though? Being open, being messy, being raw, being unfiltered, having lots of feelings. Why should we have to stifle our true nature? Let’s go after the things we want, let’s love each other brutally and honestly, and not worry about the consequences. Let’s release the feelings inside of us and let them land somewhere special. Otherwise, we might have a lifetime of longing in front of us. 

— Ryan O'Connell

[anotherprettyday]

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.

— Harvey Milk

[anotherprettyday]

Suddenly it's December

and you're not seventeen anymore.

And you haven't been seventeen in a very long time

but sometimes you need to remind yourself.

— Margaux Paul

[anotherprettyday]

Platonic love is vital, essential, and perhaps the one thing left in this wretched landscape that could save us all for a little bit longer than we deserve. I love my friends even when I don’t tell them enough. I have crawled from the wreckage of enough heartbreak to know who will still be standing when I emerge and who won’t, and I hold those still standing close to me.

— from Carly Rae Jepsen and the Kingdom of Desire by Hanif Abdurraqib

[anotherprettyday]

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

― from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

[anotherprettyday]

Bon Iver: Holocene

There’s actually no such thing as an adult. That word is a placeholder. We never grow up. We’re not supposed to. We’re born and that’s it. We get bigger. We live through great storms. We get soaked to the bone. We realize we’re waterproof. We strive for calm. We discover what makes us feel good. We do those things over and over. We learn what doesn’t feel good. We avoid those things at all cost. Sometimes we come together: huge groups in agreement. Sometimes we clap and dance. Sometimes we look like a migration of birds. We need to remind ourselves - each other - that we’re mere breaths. But, and this is important, sometimes we can be magnificent, to one person, even for a short time, like the perfect touch—the first time you see the ocean from the middle. Like every time you see the low, full moon. We keep on eating: chewing, pretending we know what’s going on. The secret is that we don’t. We don’t, and don’t, and don’t. Each day we’re infants: plucking flower petals, full of wonder.

[anotherprettyday]

Sometimes unread books on a shelf are as good as a diary entry to jog the memory. You look at the spine of a novel you bought twenty years ago at the Strand bookstore in New York. Remember you were with so and so that day. You hadn’t seen them for a long time. They didn’t want to go to the store but did you a favor when you said you only needed a few minutes to see if that book was there. You’d read very positive reviews. Later you had good pastrami sandwiches for lunch and talked…

You’ve never felt the urge to read the book although maybe one day you still will. But having it up there on the shelf, well, that’s something else. A reminder, a paper souvenir — the pages a little yellow and bent now after all this time — of a small good day in your life.

— An Unread Diary by Jonathan Carroll

[anotherprettyday]

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.

— from Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk