Only Love Remains

"Girls are taught a lot of stuff growing up. If a guy punches you he likes you. Never try to trim..."

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 13:45:19 -0400

“Girls are taught a lot of stuff growing up. If a guy punches you he likes you. Never try to trim your own bangs and someday you will meet a wonderful guy and get your very own happy ending. Every movie we see, every story we’re told implores us to wait for it, the third act twist, the unexpected declaration of love, the exception to the rule. But sometimes we’re so focused on finding our happy ending we don’t learn how to read the signs. How to tell from the ones who want us and the ones who don’t, the ones who will stay and the ones who will leave. And maybe a happy ending doesn’t include a guy, maybe… it’s you, on your own, picking up the pieces and starting over, freeing yourself up for something better in the future. Maybe the happy ending is… just… moving on. Or maybe the happy ending is this, knowing after all the unreturned phone calls, broken-hearts, through the blunders and misread signals, through all the pain and embarrassment you never gave up hope.”

- (He’s Just Not That Into You)

"One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and..."

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:39:03 -0400

“One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and won’t let you be anything less. They see the potential of you. They see endless possibilities. And through their eyes, you start to see yourself the same way. As someone who matters. As someone who can make a difference in this world.”

- Susane Colasanti, So Much Closer (via thatkindofwoman)

"Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you..."

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:35:01 -0400

““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 (via budgievivalene)

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Wed, 29 May 2013 15:15:06 -0400

bookmania: “You can never know if a person forgives you when...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:32:48 -0400

bookmania:

“You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.” — Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World (via booksaremadeofawesome)

thewolfshield: “SoulPancake hits the streets to see what...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:45:34 -0400

thewolfshield:

“SoulPancake hits the streets to see what happens when two strangers sit in a ball pit… and talk about life’s big questions.”

SoulPancake, how you do so much cool stuff?

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:41:33 -0400

"Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer…..."

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 00:56:00 -0400

“

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.

What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

”

- Martha Nussbaum (via crackedwalls)

“To be a good human is to have openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 00:51:06 -0400

“To be a good human is to have openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you are not to blame. The ethical life is based on the trust in the uncertain and a willingness to be exposed, and being more like a plant than a jewel- something rather fragile but whose particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility…If you should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. If you never trust any people then it doesn’t hurt you when things go badly. But live your life with a seriousness of commitment that you’re not adjusting your desires to the way the world actually goes, but you’re trying to rest from the world a good life and sometimes that leads you to tragedy.”

-Martha Nussbaum