self – Page 5 – secretive dreams

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (via booksqouted)

I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (via booksqouted)

Introducing these people to our friends and family is, in a way, more heedlessly exhibitionistic than posting nude photos or sex tapes of ourselves online; it’s like letting everyone watch our uncensored dreams.

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau (via acrylicalchemy)

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

Simone de Beauvoir

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale (via quoted-books)

The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.

Stephen King, Different Seasons

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

George Orwell, 1984

We are all a volume on a shelf of a library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as fiesty; we are thickly layered, page upon lying page, behind simple covers. And love – it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together.

Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart