concept playlist #1: sitting in a bustling coffee shop at 3pm on a wednesday and having the sudden, terrible realization that you’ve been stuck in an 90’s-movie-esque time loop for the past two months

like your other mood playlists, but for quotes.

1. “The trick is to keep moving. If I stop my mind settles. We don’t want to sink. Being higher is a hurdle we can leap over.” – Raych Jackson, Even The Saints Audition

2. “So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” – James Joyce, Ulysses

3. “If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me? Even then? Since we’re bound to be something, why not together…” – Mary Oliver, West Wind

4. “As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.” – Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

5. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.” – James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

6. “… how I long for the time to ripen fully, and the spring to come again after this long and appalling fall and winter.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

7. “Better not to think about / the unimaginable distance / I’m at these days.” – Bella Akhmadulina, The Garden

8. “Something’s not right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it – living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.” – Richard Siken, Birds Hover the Trampled Field

9. “My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

10. “Reality is very strange, it’s entirely unreal.” – Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life