Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.”
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“You can’t run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero’s journey.”
Anne Lamott, “Twelve Truths I Learned from Writing to Life”
“I’m glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong, this is it.”
E. B. White, letter to Stanley Hart White January 1947
“Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, ‘I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.’”
Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling (Amazon, Bookshop)
“Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”
“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”
M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf (Amazon, Bookshop)
“People seldom see themselves changing. It is like going out in the morning, or in the springtime to pick flowers. You pick and you wander till suddenly you find that the light is gone and the flowers are withered in your hand.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Amazon, Bookshop)
“Failure is a good preparation for success, which comes as a pleasant surprise, but success is poor preparation for failure.”
Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
“Being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain. ”
Emily Dickinson “If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking”
“A house has a physical definition; a home has a spiritual one.”
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden
“I am a great believer in the seasons. Even here in my own world, I have no relish for sweet corn in January or strawberries in November.”
Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds
“Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” The Essays of Montaigne
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
