It’s like flying in your dreams, she said. You empty
Yourself out and just lift off. Soar. It’s like that.

Chris Abani, taken from the poem Dog Woman

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman (via bookporn)

(via scribnerbooks)

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do us give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” —Eudora Welty, On Writing

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

That’s the thing you learn about values: they’re what people make up to justify what they did.

Max Barry, Company

(via tenacioustoafault)

It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.

Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay