Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

It was never enough, growing up, to be merely yourself, precious and unique, loved and lovable, unique, unrepeatable, irreducible. Nobody ever told you you were any of those things. The pressure was always on, and the external and internal compulsions to be Something, to be Great, to be Extraordinary, were both ubiquitous and unbearable. In our unceasing efforts to impress our parents, our friends, our enemies, to prove ourselves worthy of love, we got straight A’s, were valedictorians and salutatorians, graduated summa cum laude, danced through the hallways of academia with self-promoting narcissism masking the self-loathing lurking just beneath. We became great students, writers, actresses, singers, dancers, athletes. We lusted after elusive perfection, seeking with an insatiable and hellish desire to be the best, the brightest, the prettiest, the wittiest, the smartest, the sexiest — all embodied in being the Thinnest — whatever the cost. Eventually, we lost ourselves in the process, turning violently upon our own person, destroying our very selves in our desire to obliterate the imperfect bits.

—Eating Disorders and the Fear of Being Ordinary

Of all the seasons, autumn is the most dangerous. There is something chilling in the glorious beauty of a dying world, where every leaf and every tree reaches its pinnacle of beauty as it passes away. All this beauty born of downfall, a season in a glorious fall from grace. Everything vivid and sacred from the summer months, fallen to the clear cold blue skies of April. As chilling as an eloquent suicide note. As silent as a tomb.

—Augusta

She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love—loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

—(via ambivalents)

(Source: ke-tone)

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

—American Beauty

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.

—Audrey Hepburn

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

—Everything Is Illuminated

I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is all the difference.

—Greta Garbo

I don’t think that there’s anything worse than being ordinary.

—Angela Hayes, American Beauty