sonder

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the unsettling realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

Anthony Bourdain

(Source: chanelbagsandcigarettedrags)

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle —

“So,” she said, moving away,

“Now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.”

We tell ourselves stories.

We weave together different plot lines, wondering if the outcome of the story might be different were we to have done or said something other, all the while knowing that the various alternative outcomes are just more stories - fictions meant to distract us from what’s actually happening.

…and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anais Nin —

indiekidsindanger:

“She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while”
— Haruki Murakami

(Source: scrapedpalms)