ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
(via leadencirclesdissolve)
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
— Lao Tzu (via aplacetofindlife)
(Source: yogachocolatelove, via divinedimensions)
Marion Cotillard: Double Vision - Vogue by Peter Lindbergh, August 2012
(Source: Vogue, via leadencirclesdissolve)
Deep thoughts from the Archives
I am moving to a new apartment in a week and have been thoroughly cleaning out my apartment. The best part of the process thus far has been reading through all of my old sketchbooks, dating back to the beginning of college. Here is a journal entry that I just re-read (from about 2 years ago) that stopped me in my tracks. I had just moved to San Francisco and was living in a sublet off of Page and Divisadero. Since I wasn’t too familiar with the city yet, I’d go to this little mexican joint around the corner multiple times a week, and as I’d wait for my food, I’d write in my journal. They had these paintings on the wall- a shrimp, a heart, a skull, a rose, and a devil. The journal entry seems silly to me now, as I tried to hard to find a connection and meaning behind these paintings. Here goes nothin’:
——
We go through life learning from our mistakes, learning that resilience is hereditary by human nature. We grow thick skins after enduring countless trials and tribulations. Certain people will have certain effects on us. We fall in love, we fall out of love, we search, we settle, we worry, we cry, we laugh. We always have it better than we care to realize. We are never alone.
The Shrimp
The one who goes through part of life being afraid, but for shallow and silly reasons. They then realize they are only on this planet for a certain amount of time. Shrimps are bottom feeders. Be a top feeder.
The Heart
The trickiest of the human elements. We know everyone has one, but we do not know what kind it is, what it has endured. We are also afraid to expose too much of it. The most enlightened person does not think twice about sharing his heart. It is the ultimate tool; for good, for bad, for living. Your heart dies and you die with it.
The Skull
Those who typically only think with their heart have yet to realize how essential, if not crucia it is to balance the heart AND the mind. Once you learn how to utilize your mind and heart as team members, balancing each other out, then many of your problems will solve themselves.
The Rose
Alluring, beautiful, seemingly perfect. Will eventually prick you if you don’t know how to handle them. They are complex and no single rose is the same. Handle with care.
The Devil
We all have a demonic voice inside. Some call it temptation. Don’t ignore it as it will help you build muscle in the heart area. It will urge you to listen, therefore repeatedly make the same mistakes, yet will help you proceed with caution in the future. The Devil is always there to test you when you are unsure. After a while, he will be gone. He is your personal trainer, constantly testing your strength, your resilience, and teaching you how to battle the shrimp and handle the roses.
Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via skeletales)
(Source: larmoyante, via leadencirclesdissolve)
I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
— The Hours (via abangnotawhimper)
(via shadowami)
I always need to be making things. It’s a problem. I have a list of ideas and projects that feels like it’s never ending. But at the same time….it’s kind of a great feeling!
Illustration by Marc Johns
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.
— Margaret Atwood (via middlenameconfused)
(Source: troubled, via quote-book)
(Source: pinterest.com, via quote-book)
i
i want.
i want to.
i want to be.
i want to be something.
i want to be something extraordinary.
