Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

I am going to give you a piece of advice…advice I wish I’d been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don’t-do-acid and don’t-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, ‘When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It’s called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don’t. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don’t worry—loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact—loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.

I really don’t know what “I love you” means.
I think it means “Don’t leave me here alone.

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a stranger,
Only to someone who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.