إنّه لمثيرٌ أن تجد أجزاءً منك في شخصٍ آخر
It’s exciting when you find parts of yourself in someone else.

Zaidalhouraniquotes

…The high luxury of not having to explain.

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry featured in The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf; Selected Diaries

Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called ‘cathexis.’ In his book [M. Scott] Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us ‘confuse cathecting with loving.’ We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposities of nurturance and care.

Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.

Ram Dass

Seek to be worth knowing rather than well-known.

Unknown

I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

Maya Angelou

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but few think of changing themselves.

Leo Tolstoy

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

The signs as Anne Sexton quotes

Aries: “I was the fury of your bones.”
Taurus: “I feel very close to you although our meetings and communications have not been many. There is a vulnerability we share – the warmth, the hunger.”
Gemini: “Perhaps, all I mean to say is that I adore you. Because, in a way, I think I can be senseless with you and still make sense.”
Cancer: “I want to thank you very much for sticking by me. I couldn’t say these words to you in any way aloud because you would have been embarrassed, and I would have cried.”
Leo: “All is rush or pain or shit and glory. I think my life is exaggerating itself.”
Virgo: “I felt that you were the one person I need not explain to.”
Libra: “I have special knowledge about daisies. They last and last as you and I will. They are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.”
Scorpio: “I’m going to read a poem that tells you what kind of poet I am, what kind of woman I am, so if you don’t like it you can leave.”
Sagittarius: “Once flying, I tend to fly too high.”
Capricorn: “One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.”
Aquarius: “As I may have said, I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.”
Pisces: “I cling to my own ache, I cling to the past and it gets to a point when I can’t even remember without hurting.”