#am

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#service #family

The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#benevolence #epigram #reputation #wild

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#dramatist #morality #novelist #poet #wild

Finally, when someone asked [Pollack] how he knew when a painting was finished, he replied, “How do you know when you’ve finished making love? ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#painter #painting #dreams

I had a dream about you. You were old, and I was an infant, yet we looked identical. And probably because I knew you were going to die soon, I decided to kill you. I told myself it was the merciful thing to do, but secretly I knew the truth—I’d murdered you for your diapers. 
 ↗

— Dora J. Arod

#dreams #funny #humor #life #relationships

I decided as long as I'm going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly. ↗

— Stephenie Meyer

#ian #jamie #jared #melanie #uncle-jeb

What is life if you don't have a dream to chase? ↗

— J.C. McClean

#dreams #fate #life #dreams

Charles’ conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody’s ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#dreams

The autumn leaves, arranged in two or three scarlet terraces among the pine-trees, have fallen like ancient dreams. ↗

— Sōseki Natsume

#dreams

Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren’t sure which side you’re on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn’t make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing? ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#fiction #supernatural #vampire #supernatural