"Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck."

— The Dalai Lama (via maddierose)

"Being born a woman is an awful tragedy… Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…"

— Sylvia Plath, on rape culture, etc (via knightdress)

the frightening truth about desire

"Guilt is cancer. It will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a wall, it’s a black hole, it’s a fucking thief. It’ll keep you from you."

— In his SXSW 2013 keynote, Dave Grohl reminds us of the importance of doing things for the right reason. (via explore-blog)

"Feminine faces, as well as bodies, are trained to the expression of deference. Under male scrutiny, women will avert their eyes or cast them downward; the female gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The “nice” girl learns to avoid the bold and unfettered staring of the “loose” woman, who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases. Women are trained to smile more than men, too. In the economy of smiles, as elsewhere, there is evidence that women are exploited, for they give more than they receive in return; in a smile-elicitation study, one researcher found that the rate of smile return by women was 93 percent, by men only 67 percent. In many typical women’s jobs, graciousness, deference, and the readiness to serve are part of the work; this requires the worker to fix a smile on her face for a good part of the working day, whatever her inner state. The economy of touching is out of balance, too: men touch women more often and on more parts of the body than women touch men: female secretaries, factory workers, and waitresses report that such liberties are taken routinely with their bodies."

— Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power (via eibmorb)

"First of all, YOU WERE BORN IN THE RIGHT ERA. I often hear girls bemoan their time placement because, once upon a time, men held doors and used creative adjectives. But I’m sure you also enjoy voting and going to college and being able to wear pants without being stoned as a witch, so yeah, you’re pretty fortunate. I too have found myself thinking that my child-bearing hips would be better suited to a time when I could’ve been immortalized in oil by Peter Paul Rubens - but then, I’d also have died at 19 of appendicitis. So count your blessings and your flu shots."

— Humble Sandwich:  (via rachelfershleiser)

"Life isn’t Yugioh. I just don’t spring the “race card” to counter Blue eyes, Blond hair White Supremacist Dragon."

—

alex (via becausechocolatethatswhy)

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry because this is so fucking true. OMG I’m dying, though.

(via thegoddamazon)

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."

— J.R.R. Tolkien (via 13thmoon)