There is in the soul a desire for not thinking. For being still. Coupled with this a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous. But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch, not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.
— Raymond Carver, ‘All of Us: The Collected Poems.’
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
— Coco Chanel.
One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
— Margaret Atwood.
You don’t need to make your tastes a self-conscious statement about who you are. Just unapologetically like the things you like.
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Adulting: Step 179: Stop enjoying things ironically. Just enjoy them.
I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses… We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.
— Zelda Fitzgerald.
