Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“I would never have chosen this path, but I am very glad to be who I am, here.”
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, March 30, 1979
“Why do two colours, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No.”
Pablo Picasso, quoted in Picasso on Art by Dore Ashton
“Color is the most sacred element of all visible things.”
John Ruskin, Modern Painters
“Red is the ultimate cure for sadness.”
Bill Blass
“Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.”
Cicero, “On Old Age”
“Memory is not a straight line. It is like a tree, spreading its branches in all directions.”
Muriel Spark, “Footnote to ‘The Poet’s House,’” The Informed Air
“Time…was one of those painters who keep a work by them for half a lifetime, adding to it year after year until it is completed.”
Marcel Proust, Time Regained
“There is a joy in the pursuit of anything.”
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit
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
“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness and Other Stories
“True reading comes from pleasure, not obligation. When obliged to read something that doesn’t speak to you, you’ll ultimately forget it.”
Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life
“If you loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces that were his.”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves.”
Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
