let it be wild. let it be weeds.

One by one I drowned all the people I’d been.

—Conor Oberst

I hope to someday become a poet and a philosopher, I hope to be religious and become a woman, I mean a real woman. Not just a perfumed woman on the outside.

—Mary Karr

You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.

—Elizabeth Taylor

So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

— Veronica A. Shofstall, “After a While”

But all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

—Jack Kerouac