Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“Always, as one arrives, here is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triboro Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress!”
John Updike, “Is New York City Inhabitable?”
“Most people take action by habit in small things more often than in important things.”
Mary Oliver, “Habits, Differences, and the Light That Abides,” Long Life
“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
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
Mary McCarthy, “The Vita Activa”, The New Yorker, October 18, 1958
“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
“It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.”
La Rochefoucauld
“It is well to yield up a pleasure, when a pain goes with it.”
Publius Syrus
“In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”
Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary
“How often the prospect of future happiness is thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification!”
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Social Aims” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Read at whim! Read at whim!”
Randall Jarrell
