how to live
To choose an erotic life is not simply to chase pleasure or gratification; that would be to mistake Eros for Hedone. Rather, it is to say “yes” to the kind of friction that transforms.
Tamara • Erotic Decisions
Seek out rooms where you don't feel like you belong.
That feeling of uncertainty, fear, and discomfort is usually a sign of growth.
Sahil Bloom's Curiosity Chronicle • 22 Pieces of Career Advice I Wish I Knew at 22
I know that freedom is earned by confronting things that embarrass and trigger you, over and over again, until you are cringe-proof in your desired environment.
Sasha Chapin • 50 Things I Know
The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life — that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail
... See moreMaria Popova • Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success
Life doesn’t begin at birth. Nor at conception. Nor at some abstract marker of consciousness or legality. It begins, in earnest, at the moment of trembling recognition . When something stirs beneath reason. When you want something – or someone – without being able to explain why, and you choose to move toward it. That is the erotic decision.
Tamara • Erotic Decisions


Eros, in its ancient, Platonic sense, is the force that binds the soul to the world, that moves us toward beauty, mystery, and becoming. It is not reducible to sex, though it may include it. It is a metaphysical orientation: the decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control.
Tamara • Erotic Decisions
