“be softer with you. you are a breathing thing. a memory to someone. a home to a life.”

I promise I’ll love you forever if you please just don’t make me start now. What I mean is, on some nights I miss you so much that I never want to see you again.

The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

“It was an impulse. I was so angry, I just went out into the street,” Asplund told the Guardian. “I was thinking: ‘hell no, they can’t march here!’ I had this adrenaline. No Nazi is going to march here, it’s not okay.”

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.

No human being is illegal.

I grew up thinking that in order to live a happy life, I had to get good grades and go to a prestigious university and get a highly paid job. But as I grew older I began to realise that in order to life a happy life, I had to choose it for myself and not live a life that others expect of me, whether it be your parents, teachers or friends. This is your life. I made a decision that I didn’t want to be successful and live in a big house with fancy cars in the drive. So, I packed my bags and got out of this little town that had suffocated me for the last 18 years and drank coffee in small shops in Germany, chased the Horizon in Australia, woke up with a mountain view in Singapore. How beautiful is it to know that your feet have walked the grounds of many different countries and your skin has felt the air of many busy cities. Please darling, do not get lost in society’s belief that you are only successful if you have a well paid job, like I once had. As humans, we are going to die, that is one thing we are guaranteed in life. What will you care about the most while lying on your death bed, your fancy cars, big house? Or the stories and experience you have encountered on the journey of this beautiful thing called life? So there’s one thing I ask of you: please travel. Whether you’re 21 or 49. It is never too early nor too late so see the beautiful world.