| day 302 |

"It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction."

| week forty-three |

Yes.

| day 301 |

"Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."

| day 300 |

"Sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. You just need to know what you're going to do next!"

| day 299 |

"Yeah, they say you grow when you don't succeed, but it's hard to breathe when no one believes in me."

| day 298 |

"Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world."

| day 297 |

"Somehow she always seems blurred, as though to focus on anything that exists beyond a canvas might prove too difficult for her tiny frame to handle. When I was a very little girl, whenever she made me angry, I would imagine a strong wind simply blowing her away."

| day 296 |

"Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next."

| day 295 |

"My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one."

| week forty-two |

10 more weeks...and I am getting so tired.

I know my pictures have been weaker lately. I don't know if it's just a usual slump, or if it's because I'm getting so close to the end that I just want it to be over. I haven't figured it out yet. Regardless, I'm going to try and step up again soon. I think when I'm in New Orleans next week and OBX in 3 weeks, pictures will be a lot of fun and more creative. I already have ideas for OBX pictures, so I'm pretty pumped.

Until next time...(hey, at least I posted a blog this week)!

| day 294 |

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

| day 293 |

"Sometimes a horse has got to do what a horse has got to do."

| day 292 |

"To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins."

---

Guess who didn't want to do her picture today? Blah.

| day 291 |

"Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

| day 290 |

"I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish."

| day 289 |

"She will not be simple and sweet. She will not be what people tell her she should be."

| day 288 |

"And I will be loathing, loathing you my whole life long."

| week forty-one|

| day 287 |

"I don't know what I've done or if I like what I've begun. But something told me to run, and honey, you know me - it's all or none."

| day 286 |

"When I look in the mirror, I know I’m looking at someone who isn’t sure she deserves to be loved at all."

| day 285 |

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

| day 284 |

"I forgive nothing. If you stole my orange crayon in the fifth grade, you're still on my hit list, buddy."

| day 283 |

"You got a fast car, I want a ticket to anywhere. Maybe we make a deal, maybe together we can get somewhere - anyplace is better. Starting from zero, got nothing to lose. Maybe we'll make something, but me, myself I got nothing to prove."

| day 282 |

"As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--'Is this all?'"

| day 281 |

"By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives."

| week forty |

| day 280 |

"But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin."

| day 279 |

"True friends stay with you no matter the distance or time that separates you from them."

| day 278 |

"You seem to believe you belong to somebody else. When you leave me alone in this world, you know that I'm in hell. Do you know what it's like to be lonely and by yourself?"

| day 277 |

"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."

| day 276 |

"She hides true love en su bolsillo. She's got a halo around her finger. Around you."

| day 275 |

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."

| day 274 |

"And up until now I had sworn to myself that I'm content with loneliness because none of it was ever worth the risk. Well, you are the only exception."

| week thirty-nine |

I know I don't give a decent blog often, but I really need to feel it. But here's one that I feel like I'm going to ramble in.

I have 92 days left. This is nuts. Where did a year go?

This is all kinda weird to me. I don't even know what to say sometimes. Lately I've been slacking and less creative, but these last few weeks of school have been absolute insanity. No lie. I don't know how I get my pics up sometimes.

I hope that once summer rolls around I can kind of just let the creative juices flow again. I guess we'll see. And I guess this blog was less than I thought it would be. That's okay =)

| day 273 |

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

| day 272 |

"Nobody knows where the hell I've been."