how to avoid half-heartedness

Briana West: “You want [love] to provide for you what you think you cannot give yourself: stability, security, hope, happiness. So long as you function on this belief, you place “love” as being something that is outside of you when the reality is that you cannot see, create, or experience on the outside what you are not already.”

Don’t rely on someone else to give you what you need. Choose what nourishes you every day. See how strong you become when you remember that love is just reassertation, choosing something over and over. Do it one more time & watch mundane repetition become something transcendent.

What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced.

What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect.

“Choose your art, practice your art, always, always choose your art over and above anything else. If you can’t do that, then you have—what, a few more years?”

I think that people come alive when they’re serious about what they love—when they choose to pay careful attention to what feeds and sustains them. I love this one Heather Havrilesky line about how crushes are often just misplaced ambition. Of course crushes are more than that—they’re about nostalgia and magic and futures we’ll never access—but I t... See more