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The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-yourself and for hours meeting no one—this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings… Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future—only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your atittude toward people.
Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
Jun 15, 2013 / 4 notes
For me, a woman who is absorbed in her work, who does not care about gaining one’s favour, strong yet subtle at the same time, is essentially more seductive. The more she hides and abandons her femininity, the more it emerges from the very heart of her existence.
Jun 3, 2013 / 19 notes
[C]haracter — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs… To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us.
May 30, 2013 / 1 note
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
C.S. Lewis, Four Loves
May 21, 2013 / 7 notes
People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.
V. Roth, Insurgent
May 7, 2013 / 14 notes
May 5, 2013

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LIFESTYLE | QUOTABLE » By Jennie Wong

From The Ravenous Muse, a collection of writings by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace
Apr 25, 2013 / 1 note
‘One of my girlfriends gave me a beautiful button-down shirt with strict instructions—she said don’t you dare button it up to the top! Just buy a beautiful bra.’
Apr 20, 2013 / 3 notes
I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.
Alexander McQueen
Apr 20, 2013 / 3 notes
Who, being loved, is poor?
Oscar Wilde
Apr 15, 2013 / 2 notes
It is a risk to love. What if it doesn’t work out? Ah, but what if it does.
P. McWilliams
Mar 30, 2013 / 1 note
The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.
Virginia Woolf, Literary Jukebox
Mar 5, 2013 / 2 notes
Live on coffee and flowers. Try not to worry what the weather will be.
Matt Berninger
Feb 17, 2013 / 1 note
Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.
Albert Einstein
Feb 15, 2013 / 2 notes
I’m simply sick of companies using the boogeymonster of ‘old and fat’ and the cliché of ‘female empowerment’ to sell products to women who have come to equate thinness and youth (i.e., being 20-something) with all things good and happy, regardless of their actual mental and physical state, and who think some THING can empower them, rather than taking responsibility to empower themselves. “If I could just lose 20 pounds, I’d be happy”….”If I could just afford designer clothes, I’d be happy”… No, sweetheart — if you could just find a job you don’t hate, have the guts to dump the boyfriend who puts you down all the time, and stop fearing your 30th birthday and being single, you’d probably be happy.
Feb 3, 2013