5 Quotes From Thought Catalog That Will Make You Fall In Love With Writing

Do you know that feeling you get when you read something that’s so unbelievably special? It may send chills down your spine. Maybe it’s the first time you realize someone else can relate to whatever you’re going through. Maybe it allows you to look at something through completely new lenses, a different angle. Maybe it makes your heart skip a beat. Whatever that literary X factor is, you know it when you see it. Thought Catalog has thousands of posts from thousands of authors. Each passage is unique. Here are 5 passages from Thought Catalog that will make you fall in love with writing:

1. “And, you can’t stop going. You can’t just let this world swallow you. You have to peel your beaten self off the pavement and find your legs again, find that strength again. This world will give you no reasons to believe in it, to believe in goodness and love and light, so you must become that reason for others. Every day, seek to become the reason someone else believes in love.”- Jamie Varon, If You’re Feeling Hopeless and Lost

2. “Beating your demons doesn’t always mean being free from them. It doesn’t always mean curing them or completely getting rid of them. Sometimes, beating your struggles just means surviving through them. Doing things anyway. Living out the life you want, regardless of the things that are trying to hold you back. Acknowledging that your struggles exist and your struggles are real, acknowledging that sometimes they terrify you and try to paralyze you, but refusing to allow your suffering to get in the way of your life.” – Kim Quindlen, If You Feel Like Your Struggles Never Stop Coming Back To You

3. “The dating game is a vicious cycle that has taken any semblance of human emotion almost entirely out of the picture. And yet, as much as I’m frustrated by the culture, I’d like to think that there are still good people behind it. That we’re not all selfish, desensitized robots, controlled by the endless monotony of swiping right, being matched and feeling validated. That every once in a while, we stop to question ourselves. What we’re doing. What we’re looking for, and how exactly we’re going about it. I’d like to think that as much as we all lie, deceive and discontinue, what we want deep down is still to tell the truth. That we want to believe each other. To trust each other. To be honest with each other, even when it’s painful and uncomfortable. I’d like to believe all this and yet some part of me knows that as a society, we’re still all very far from figuring it out. And so for now, we pick our phones up. We feel that age-old hunger for validation. And we swipe. And we swipe. And we swipe.” – Heidi Priebe, Why Good People Ghost: The Rise Of A Dishonest Dating Culture

4. “You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life.” – Bianca Sparacino, How to Ruin Your Life (Without Even Noticing that You Are)

5. “We realize that this more we want is a lie. We want phone calls. We want to see a face we love absent of the blue dim of a phone screen. We want slowness. We want simplicity. We want a life that does not need the validation of likes, favorites, comments, upvotes. We may not know yet that we want this, but we do. We want connection, true connection. We want a love that builds, not a love that gets discarded for the next hit. We want to come home to people. We want to lay down our heads at the end of our lives and know we lived well, we lived the fuck out of our lives. This is what we want even if we don’t know it yet.”- Jamie Varon, This Is How We Date Now