😀Ashley😜

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

“You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you — life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again.”

“a whole world exists within you that you’ve spent too long cultivating and healing so you have every right to be cautious about who travels it, every right to exercise discernment when it comes to who should experience it, every right to choose you first if they can’t respect it.”

“The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: ‘These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself.”

“I have come to realise it doesn’t make much sense to ponder the meaning of life; that it is a question induced by melancholy; that an answer is not really what we are looking for. Does it not disappear the minute we find joy again? Who, when finally seized by a great desire to love, to dance, to work, still wonders: what is the meaning of life?”

“As a child, I had trouble forming friendships, and turned instead to fantasy. I could imagine myself into the books I read and, by embellishing the characters, supply myself with precisely the sorts of friends that I’d always longed for. If you have engaged in this kind of fantasizing, you know that the thrill of creativity eventually collapses into a feeling of emptiness. This is the moment when loneliness hits. You’ve prepared yourself an elaborate psychological meal, and you realize, belatedly, that it can never sate your real hunger.”

There is no surer way of evading the world than by art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by art.

Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.

“Some days healing is for laughter, playfulness, and friends. Some days healing is for silence, rest and solitude. Some days healing is for accepting that getting better doesn’t always look the same, and that’s okay.”

“Don’t keep staring at the way things are. It keeps you stuck. Look for how they can become. It moves you forwards.”