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Mackenzie Herbert, Chasing Trains // Artwork by @/archbudzar on ig // Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration // Lana M.H. Wilder

- Mandeq Ahmed, 'Ocean of Tears'

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

Rachel Carson

Ah, to be able to live a thousand different lives in a thousand different ways, but in the end, to live only this one.

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want so many things? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

I'll shut myself off from everyone to the point of insensibility. Make an enemy of everyone, speak to no one.

- Franz Kafka, from Diaries

Unknown || Dulce María Loynaz, tr. by James O'Connor, from Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems || D.H. Lawrence || Mary Ruefle || Aristotle || Artwork by Mask Obscura || Marty Robbins, You’re Breaking My Heart || Maria Montessori

When Jonathan Safran said “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” and when Doc Luben said “How do we forgive ourselves for all of the things we did not become?"

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

- Elizabeth Kinkaid-Ehlers, from “Still Searching,” The Connecticut Review (2019)

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

—how wonderful to be who I am,

made out of earth and water,

my own thoughts, my own fingerprints—

all that glorious, temporary stuff.

- Mary Oliver, excerpt of “On Meditating, Sort Of”, in Blue Horses

- Anais Nin, 1917