A friend of mine said to me: "You have to believe that life is more than the sum of its parts, kiddo." I remember it right down to the "kiddo" part. But when I think about what she said, the same thing always comes into my head: "What if you can't put the pieces together in the first place?" 

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts - it's what you do with what you have left.

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next. 

Just because today is a terrible day doesn't mean tomorrow might not be the best day of your entire life. You just have to wake up and get there. 

These things happen. What other people say doesn't change the way you are. Remember what we always say? It's just part of the journey. Life isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you handle what happens.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory. 

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. 

She was both wise and stupid in the way that when life got hard she didn't work through her problems; she just danced in her underwear alone in her room until they went away.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. 

There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out. 

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily. "So it is." "And freezing." "Is it?" "Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately." 

Well, most learn to walk life's road by themselves. But a sad few of us simply stop trying. 

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another. 

There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves. 

Think of a car driving through the night. The headlights only go a hundred or two hundred feet forward, and you can make it all the way from California to New York driving through the dark, because all you have to see is the next two hundred feet. And that's how life tends to unfold before us. If we just trust that the next two hundred feet will unfold after that, and the next two hundred feet will unfold after that, your life will keep unfolding. And it will eventually get you to the destination of whatever it is you truly want, because you want it. 

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. 

People are always worried about what's happening next. They often find it difficult to stand still, to occupy the now without worrying about the future. People are not generally satisfied with what they have; they are very concerned with what they are going to have.

The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.

Everything I'm not made me everything I am.

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what we want most for what we want in the moment.

We don't see things how they are, we see things how we are. 

Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire. 

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

You wanna know what living life to the fullest actually is? It's waking up on a Monday morning with no complaints. It's knowing you always deserve to laugh. It's doing what feels right no matter what. It's doing what you want to, no matter how stupid you look. It's about being yourself, cause no one can tell you you're doing it wrong. 

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. 

You wear the tie because it never occurred to you not to. You eat eggs every morning but never at night. You feel excitement and companionship when rich men you've never met put a ball through a net or over a goal line, you feel guilty and a little suspicious every time you see a Salvation Army Santa ringing his bell, you look down at least half a second if a woman leans forward and your stomach rumbles every time you drive by a golden arch even if you weren't hungry before. Everybody's programmed.

It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. 

And by the way, everything in life is write able about if you have the outgoing guts to to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt. 

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible. 

I'm not old enough to play baseball or football. I'm not eight yet. My Mom told me when you start baseball, you aren't going to be able to run that fast because you had an operation. I told Mom I wouldn't need to run fast. When I play baseball, I'll just hit them out of the park. Then I'll be able to walk. 

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed.

You don't have to be a "person of influence" to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me. 

There is no telling how many miles you will have to run while chasing a dream.

You dont know what goes on in anyone's life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person's life, you're not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can't be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person's life, you're messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.  

You can tell a lot about a person by the way he handles four things: a rainy day, the elderly, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. 

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; 
there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. 
The past is for inspiration, not imitation, 
for continuation, not repetition.

Life's greatest comforts is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you. 

To me, the glass is half-empty some days and half-full on others. Sometimes it's bone-dry. Or overflowing. 

Endings are never easy. I always build them up so much in my head that they can't possibly live up to my expectations and I just end up disappointed. I'm not even sure why it matters to me so much how things end. I guess it's because we all want to believe that what we do is very important. That people hang on to our every word, that they care what we think. The truth is, you should consider yourself lucky if you even occasionally get to make someone, anyone, feel a little better. 

The thing is--fear can't hurt you any more than a dream. 

Some things, however, are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how prettily told. Some doors, once they're opened, can never be closed again, just as some trust, once it's been lost, can never be won back.

Its a funny thing about life... if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

I guess that's the point of it all. No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same. 

When we are struck at without reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be. 

And then it came. The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it. Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth.

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way. 

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. 

You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. 

But the worst thing the truth can do? Is when you finally tell it, it doesn't set you free... but locks you away, forever.

The big reason why folks leave a small town, he used to say, is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out. He meant that no one is happy, anywhere. 

We do not do what we want, and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were. All you really have... is now. 

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. None of this matters. We're just warming up. 

Everybody does stupid things, it shouldn't cost them everything they want in life. 

How am I supposed to recover when I don’t even understand my disease? 

These are my words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact. 

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. 

People are nice to other people because people are good, decent and caring. Either that, or people are cowards. If I’m mean to you, you’ll be mean to me. Mutually assured destruction.

Change the way you look at things, and the thing you look at changes.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

Hindsight is 20/20... Knowing now what we didn't know then, realizing we can never fix things, and giving up what's hopelessly lost.

There's a reason we evolved the feeling of awkwardness; it tells us not to talk about things. 

I was stuck. I was in this place, in between my future and my past and I wasn't sure which one I wanted more. But I guess it was only natural, you know? To dream of a summer love from long ago or nights you spent with your friends you used to know. These people had long since gone and part of you wanted them back and God, you hated to admit it. That was the funny part — like admitting you missed people or things or times long ago made you weak or something, but it didn't. And sometimes, I would curl up by my window and stare off into the stars, dreaming of my future; the love and friends I had yet to come. Part of me just wanted to throw myself into the future and the other part wanted me to hurl myself into my past.

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. 

But what I've always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he'd done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

If your presence doesnt make any difference, your absence wont either.

If you ever doubt the power of language, listen more closely. Witness the magic the first time someone whispers "i love you." Watch a woman put on head phones, close her eyes, and have her life changed by a lyric. See a bad moment flipped upside down by a well timed joke. Words propel us, empower us, make us human and more than human. We constantly struggle to say what we mean and mean what we say. To "wrestle with words and meanings." that's what t.s. eliot calls it. But as we whisper and shout, stutter and spin, we create order out of the chaos around us. We are built of words, and we live by them, too. 

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday. 

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept. 

If for one minute you think you're better than a sixteen year old girl in a Green Day t-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favourite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.

It seems like the simplest concept: just push them all away and you’ll never get hurt. However, the simplest isn’t always the most effective. Someday, somebody’s going to find their way in, and they’re going to leave you on your knees.

Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. That is why you cannot love two people the same. It simply is not possible. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness they draw out of you. And the more you know another, the richer the colors of that relationship.

That’s why love is madness. It’s too easy to lose your mind when you lose your heart.

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other. 

I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone. 

And I can't stand the way people say,"When I was a child, I loved elephants," "When I was a child, I loved ballons." Are they trying to say that if they stopped and looked at a balloon today or an elephant, they would not love them? Why wouldn't they love them? I think we still love what we always loved. 

There is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else; they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, intstead of creating the perfect love. 

There are the people who are right for you on paper, and then there are the people who are just right. 

I need to see you face to face... because I'm never as good as when you’re there... and I can see myself the way you look at me. And I'm sorry. If we could just get together and find some time to talk. Let's say all the things we never said. 

I'm outside of your window with my radio; you are the only station, you play the song I know. You are the song I know.

It’s when you hold eye contact for that second too long or maybe the way you laugh. It sets off a flash and our memories take a picture of who we are at that point when we first know “This is love.” And we clutch that picture to our hearts because we expect each other to always be the people in that picture. But people change. People aren’t pictures. And you can either take a new picture or throw the old one away. 

Maybe I'm not the one that you hoped for, And you're right, maybe I'll never change. Maybe there's not much here to love, but maybe you can love me anyway. Yeah but baby I love you, the best that I can. Well it might not be pretty, but it's all that I am. 

There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.  

He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked. 

To those who have given up on love, I say, 'trust life a little bit.' 

Out of nowhere she told me when she grew up she wanted to marry me. I said, 'Why me?' And she looked up at me and said, 'because, you are my anyway friend.'  At the time I didn’t know what that meant, so she had to explain to me that an anyway friend is the one person in your life who that no matter what they say or do, no matter what they’ve been through with you, they love you anyway. 

Sometimes we have to stay away from the things we love, and learn to appreciate the things we need.

To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life

It is a risk to love. What if it doesn't work out? Ah, but what if it does? 

Don’t let go too soon. But don’t hang on too long. 

It's kind of like he's one of those songs that goes around and around in your head, and you just can't get it out. 

You can’t force love, I realized. It’s there or it isn’t. If it’s not there,  you’ve got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.

The things that people in love do to each other they remember, and if they stay together it's not because they forget, it's because they forgive. 

It takes so little not only to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

You can ask the universe for all the signs you want, but ultimately, we see what we want to see when we're ready to see it. 

I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people a little more than they needed me.

A high school boyfriend isn't a husband; he's an obstacle.

that was 100 pics and 100 quotes! comment.sub.rec.