Independence is the luxury of all those people who are too confident, and busy, and popular, and attractive to be just plain old lonely. And make no mistake, lonely is absolutely the worst thing to be. Tell someone that you’ve got a drink problem, or an eating disorder, or your dad died when you were a kid even, and you can almost see their eyes light up with the sheer fascinating drama and pathos of it all, because you’ve got an issue, something for them to get involved in, to talk about and analyse and discuss and maybe even cure. But tell someone you’re lonely and of course they’ll seem sympathetic, but look very carefully and you’ll see one hand snaking behind their back, groping for the door handle, ready to make a run for it, as if loneliness itself were contagious. Because being lonely is just so banal, so shaming, so plain and dull and ugly.

— David Nicholls, Starter For Ten

She said: “The neon on the river will light my way
And all the things that we’ve been dreaming of, we’ll make them real one day
So save your money, pack your bag; I want to run with you on Stamford Hill.”
She took the train into the city but you stood still. 

Realize that traveling doesn’t fix your problems. A week after I graduated, I was on a transatlantic flight to London for a three-week trip across Western Europe. I traveled because I expected new cities to whisper some ancestral secret to me. I expected them to reflect my destiny on the buildings of their foreign downtowns, that the anxieties that haunted me in San Diego would somehow stay there if I flew away fast enough. Maybe it’s because I was reading The Bell Jar, or maybe it’s because I’d been traveling for a couple weeks by then, but in a second-story coffee shop in Berlin I realized that wherever I traveled, my same, age-old neuroses would follow: My fears, and regrets, and unresolved conflicts snuck their way into my suitcase and spilled out onto the hostel-room floor along with my boxers. Plath says it best, “If [she] had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of a difference to me, because wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” The trick, I’ve learned, is finding the courage to lift the jar wherever I find myself.

— Thought Catalog

May you do the things you want to and always remember what it felt like when you were doing them.

— I Wrote This For You: The House We Keep Moments In (via kari-shma)

(via quote-book)

officialiwrotethisforyou:

You can only hurt someone until there’s nothing left to hurt.

1. I need to stop stalking the Chelsea FC tag on tumblr.
2. Ditto John Mayer tag.
3. Born and Raised is released in the UK! I’ve already been listening to the stream of the album on repeat but now I finally have it on my iPod ♥
4. In the summer after all the exams are over I will buy the physical album.
5. STILL CAN’T GET OVER THE FACT THAT CHELSEA WON THE CL!!!
6. Developing a footballing crush on Gary Cahill because he is so amazing. (And singing Sexy and I Know It for his initiation?? a man after my own heart lolol I kid)
7. STOP IT. I have an exam in two days!!! And I have an insane amount of statutes/cases/arguments to memorise.
8. Doing my laundry + making a snack at 1am. I love university life.
9. Go wild in the age of worry, and say “worry, why should I care?” 
10. Me and my first world problems. Shut up, self absorbed individual.

“I like drinking coffee alone and reading alone. I like riding the bus alone and walking home alone. It gives me time to think and set my mind free. I like eating alone and listening to music alone. But when I see a mother with her child, a girl with her lover, or a friend laughing with their best friend, I realize that even though I like being alone, I don’t fancy being lonely. The sky is beautiful, but the people are sad. I just need someone who won’t run away.”

(Source: buddhacoffee, via highspeedt)