Finding It

The best parts of life are the things we can't plan. And it's a lot harder to find happiness if you're only searching in one place. Sometimes, you just have to throw away the map. Admit that you don't know where you're going and stop pressuring yourself to figure it out. Besides...a map is a life someone else already lived. It's more fun to make your own.

Life was easier when you stopped caring, when you stopped expecting things to get better.

This funny thing happens when you graduate college. You hear so much about being an adult that you start to feel like you have to become a different person overnight, that growing up means being not you. And you concentrate so hard on living up to the term "adult" that you forget growing up happens by living, not by sheer force of will.

You don't realize how small you really are until you're faced with something like that. We live our lives as if we're at the center of our own universe, but we're just tiny pieces of a shattered whole.

Adventures don't happen when you're worried about the future or tied down by the past. They only exist in the now. And they always,always come at the most unexpected time,in the least likely of packages. An adventure is an open window; and an adventurer is the person willing to crawl out on the ledge and leap.

New Life Realization #1: Being an adult is hard work. I know people tell you this growing up, but it doesn’t really sink in until you’re living it, waist deep in the swamps of no-free-time and not-enough-money. New Life Realization #2: It’s worth it.

The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. Just tired of...being.

It's a quiet thing when your heart breaks. I thought it would be loud, ... I thought it would drown everything else out. But it happened like a whisper. A small, clean split. It broke in a second, and the pain was little more than a pinprick. It's the echo that kills you. ... that tiny little sound kept bouncing around the cavern of my ribs, getting louder and louder. It multiplied until I heard a hundred hearts breaking, a thousand, more. All of them mine.

Women love a mystery. But only if we think we can figure it out.

I'm going to kiss you, princess. But not now, not when you're telling me to. Not when it's just something you want to check off a list. I'll kiss you when it counts.

Everyone deserves one grand adventure, that one time in life that we always get to point back to and say, “Then … then I was really living.

I'll be good. I promise. Unless you want me to be bad, of course.

Every day. I will prove every day how much you mean to me. How real this is.

If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. I wonder if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.

I want to memorize the way your eyes clench shut and you bite down on your lip, so that I can sketch your expression from memory. I want to know the exact angle of the way your neck curves, and how many times your heart beats a minute. I want to know everything.

Life wasn't pretty, but it also wasn't scary until she met a man who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost.

You're the most confusing person I've ever met, and sometimes I hate you.

Say that this is real. That it counts.

There was no room for unhappiness when squeezed between two sets of washboard abs. New life motto, right there.

You want to hear it? Fine. It’s a simple story really, about a pretty girl who was pretty stupid. She let a man touch her because she was scared to say no, and then she told her parents because she was scared to say nothing. Then they were scared to do anything that might ruin their pretty little lives, so they told the girl that it was nothing. That just being touched wasn’t enough to fight for. Too scared to prove them wrong, she kept going like it was nothing, and she let more people touch her, never knowing that she was handing out pieces of herself. Or, hell, maybe she knew deep down, and she just hated herself so much that she was glad to be rid of them. And life wasn’t pretty, but it also wasn’t scary until she met a man with two names who touched her without taking and made her miss the pieces she had lost. And now things aren’t just scary, they’re fucking terrifying, and I can’t do it. I can’t live like this, knowing all that I’ve ruined and that it can’t be fixed.

If there’s anything I learned with you, it’s that one more day was never enough

Just stay with me. We'll beat it together, okay? Say you'll stay with me.

You make it hard to think straight.

I don't care what you think you need.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

And as much as I was dying to know, I also knew that there was bliss in oblivion.

... I charged most of our fun on Daddy's credit card. Not like he would notice or care. And if he did, he'd always said that if money didn't buy happiness, then people were spending it wrong.

You don't realize how many bridges there are until the sight of one collapses something inside of you.

Somebody pinch me." A man with a horrendously hairy chest and a Speedo so tight it was probably cutting off circulation passed by me at that moment, and did just that. I yelped and held a hand to my ass, gawking at his retreating back. Jenny laughed. "Maybe this place is magic, and whatever we say comes true. Ryan Gosling, please!

He caught my hands as they pulled through my hair, and pulled my body against his, and I felt all the holes in me. My sobs echoed through them like caverns, and I never would have thought empty could be made of such weight. I couldn’t breathe around it.