the things that shape my life

Despite the title, I sometimes quote songs, poems or prose. Anything that has impacted me in a way and hopefully you too are affected and it sets your thoughts going. Personal: charlowarlo.tumblr.com

[booknecdotes-blog]

You'll have bad times but that'll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren't paying attention to

Sean Maguire 

[observando]

It is not where we are that matters nor what we have, it is what we do with where we are and what we have.

Sonia Rumzi (via observando)

[booknecdotes-blog]

They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.

Mohsin Hamid

[booknecdotes-blog]

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view." "Why?" "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self” Excerpt From: Wilde, Oscar. “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

[booknecdotes-blog]

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

Oscar Wilde

[booknecdotes-blog]

But hurting ourselves to inflict pain on others is just another cry to be loved.

[thepianofarm]

Today. There is a bank safe dropped into the river. I cannot get inside it. I am breathing underwater with special headphones pushed up to the vault’s walls to try and hear some shape of what is inside. There is some soft song, a buzz, a melody, a quiet, a gone, and then a return of...

[the-final-sentence]

The reflections from the carriage windows scorched the world and then left it alone once more in the darkness.

Igor Savelyev, from “Modern-Day Pastoral” in Squaring the Circle, translated by Amanda Love Darragh

(via the-final-sentence)

[booknecdotes-blog]

It is like when you are upset and you hold a radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.

Mark Haddon

[harukimurakami]

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

1Q84 (via harukimurakami)

[booknecdotes-blog]

Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and - no matter how much we despised ourselves for it - unable quite to let each other go

[booknecdotes-blog]

Tommy took a few strides after them - it was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind

[booknecdotes-blog]

It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,” Tsukiko says “It is too familiar, too comfortable .

Erin Morgenstern

[litverve]

Enough is so vast a sweetness I suppose it never occurs — only pathetic counterfeits…

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to T. W. Higginson, 26 September 1870 (via litverve)

[booknecdotes-blog]

I burn with so much capacity for love, but have no vessel for it.

Khyan Mansley

[booknecdotes-blog]

a bad dream

; i was fighting

but i just feel too tired 

to be fighting, guess I'm not the fighting kind.

Wouldn't mind it if you were by my side 

But you're long gone,

yeah you're long gone now.

[booknecdotes-blog]

I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

Charles "Chick" Benetto