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"So many people will enter and leave your life...

Dad said: we CAN'T be afraid. Sometimes, we have to face our fears."

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My brother has the other half. "...because everything was the way it was." We both had a hard time growing up but we're better because of it.

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My favorite tattoo. I got it after getting out of treatment for addiction and self harm. It reminds me of all the things I can no longer do but, most importantly, of all the different ways my life can go as long as I'm in recovery.

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Sure everything is illuminated in the light of the past. Done in Downtown Tattoos in New Orleans. 

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Here’s my second tattoo. It’s from Jonathan Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. :)

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Gustav Klimt's Tree of Life + excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredible Close "Here's the point of everything I have been trying to tell you. It's always necessary. I love you, Grandma"

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"I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all."

"We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our family and our friends, and even the people who aren’t on out lists, people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the whole universe."

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"My fathers message to notstop looking, and I wouldn’t, not ever." This is something I’ve always wanted. I will Notstop looking for the things in life that make me happy, no matter what.

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"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By mid afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if one day he might convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad, I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room."

—Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer 

I’ver read this book about a million times, and I’ll probably read it a million more because it never ceases to make me feel a roller coaster of emotions. It holds a special place for me as my favorite book as well as my boyfriend’s.

I had actually planned on getting this tattoo while in Iceland (one of my favorite parts of the trip was waking up and seeing the mountains outside my window every morning, thus, the mountain range tattoo). I didn’t have the money at the time, though, and really haven’t had it up until just now. I don’t mind having waited for so long to get it, though, because I love the way it turned out! 

Instagram: chrisjohnsattorneyatlaw

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hi vis hello

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"One day I wandered away from her and hid. I liked the way it felt to have someone look for me, to hear my name again and again. ‘Oskar! Oskar!’ Maybe I didn’t even like it, but I needed it right then…Ever since that day, whenever we go on walks she makes us play a game like Marco Polo, where she calls my name and I have to call back to let her know that I’m OK.

'Oskar.'

'I'm OK.'”

—-

"I told him, ‘I don’t do anything,’ he laughed, ‘Don’t be so modest,’ Anna’s father said. ‘I want to be a sculptor.’ Mr. Goldberg took off his glasses, untucked his shirt from his pants, and cleaned his lenses with his shirttail. ‘You want to be a sculptor?’ I said, ‘I am trying to be a sculptor.’ He put his glasses back on his face, pulling the wire ear-pieces behind his ears, and said, ‘In your case, trying is being.’ ‘What do you do?’ I asked, in a voice more challenging than I’d wanted. He said, ‘I don’t do anything anymore.’ Anna’s father told him, ‘Don’t be so modest,’ although he didn’t laugh this time, and he told me, ‘Simon is one of the great minds of our age.’ ‘I’m trying,’ Mr. Goldberg said to me, as if only the two of us existed. ‘Trying what?’ I asked, in a voice more concerned than I’d wanted, he took off his glasses again, ‘Trying to be.’"

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Justine’s tattoo inspired by “The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss:

"She leaned back and looked at him with something like hurt, and then he almost but didn’t say the two sentences he’d been meaning to say for years:

Part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.”

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"You are the only person who has understood even a whisper of me, and I can tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you." - Alex Perchov, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Decided to post a picture of my Everything is Illuminated tattoo.

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Inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

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“I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.”

My Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tattoos. Both done by Jessie McNally at Steady Tattoo in Minneapolis. The first was done in 2011 and the second in 2014.

“We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren’t on our lists, people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.”