Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
Bad luck in small doses can cast a glittering light on the rest of life.
ANN PATCHETT
“Sometimes the Luck in in the Fall”
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
Every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
I realized I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. It was the happiness of the right-before, when everything is potential and no branch on the tree of possibility has yet been closed off by action.
DAWN DRZAL
The Bread and the Knife
Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either…Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.
DAG HAMMARSKJOLD
Markings
Beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see.
JOHN GREEN
The Anthropocene Reviewed
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
JOHN RUSKIN
The Stones of Venice
One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
WALLACE STEVENS
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird,”
The Palm at the End of the Mind
This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and me only.
W. H. AUDEN
“Reading,” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays
The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.
ANNE TRUITT
Turn: The Journal of an Artist
If you ever want to keep up a grudge against someone, don’t see that person alongside beautiful flowers.
JAMAICA KINCAID
My Garden (Book)
Change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.
RACHEL KUSHNER
The Mars Room
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro
