If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it. —C.S Lewis (via ihatenietzsche)

(Source: narnia--freak)

Sometimes she seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, of course, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close. Her eyes were astoundingly blue and astoundingly sharp. Nothing escaped her. She saw everything, and since most of what there is to see in the world is painful, she often lived in pain. —Erica Jong, Remembering Anne Sexton  (via le-entracte)

(Source: The New York Times)

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it. —Bill Cosby (via ohfairies)

(Source: rabbitinthemoon)

You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world that’s inside you. —1Q84, Haruki Murakami  (via thenocturnals)

(Source: hi-mi-zu)

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can. —Frida Kahlo   (via hay-girl-hay-lesbifriends)

(Source: ckgarden)

What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.”

And yet it is: so much so that young men seem to think there’s nothing wrong with—and maybe something hilarious about—sharing pictures of themselves raping young women. And why not? Their friends will defend them, as they did in Steubenville, tweeting that the young woman was “asking for it” and that the boys were being unfairly targeted.

Women and girls are the ones expected to carry the shame of the sexual crimes perpetrated against them. And that shame is a tremendous load to bear, because once you’re labeled a slut, empathy and compassion go out the window. The word is more than a slur—it’s a designation.

—“In Rape Tragedies, the Shame Is Ours,” my latest at The Nation (via jessicavalenti)

Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again. —Finn Butler (via mareeko)

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it. —Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (via perfect)

(Source: articulateimagination)

The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel. —Steve Furtick  (via middecember)

(Source: larmoyante)

If you truly pour your heart into what you believe in, even if it makes you vulnerable, amazing things can and will happen. —Emma Watson, Trailblazer Honoree, MTV Movie Awards 2013 (via meetthedarkmark)