Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“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.”
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Amazon, Bookshop)
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods Of Reform,” Pamphlets: Translated from the Russian
[Of her family’s bookshelves] “The majority of what sat there spoke to my father’s sense of the world—or the world as he’d like us to know it: a vast and varied place full of mystery and order, just those two forces working together and upon each other in ceaselessly fascinating ways.”
Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light (Amazon, Bookshop)
“If you ever want to keep up a grudge against someone, don’t see that person alongside beautiful flowers.”
Francis Bacon, “Of Beauty” (Amazon, Bookshop)
“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”
Alfred Tennyson, “Oenone”
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
(Amazon, Bookshop)
“You know that book; you forget the title after you’ve returned it and over the years you try to look it up a few times, but you never find it again.”
Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (Amazon, Bookshop)
“I put my hand on Lucy’s back and felt her uneven breaths, the tremor of her shoulder blades. I was stunned by the rawness of her pain. I came to understand that night in the sports bar, safe from the blinding rain, that I could not worry about Lucy anymore. I knew then it was just too enormous for me to manage and that worrying about her would swamp me. If I was swamped by worry, I would be useless to her. It was even possible that I would desert her, and that was the thing that could never happen.”
Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty: a Friendship (Amazon, Parnassus)
