Courtesy of Gretchin Rubin: The Happiness Project
“He knew that under the tall grass of an apparently untamed future the steel rails of fear and habit were already laid. What he suddenly couldn’t bear, with every cell in his body, was to act out the destiny prepared for him by his past, and slide obediently along those rails, contemplating bitterly all the routes he would rather have taken.”
Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope
“If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the Incommunicable.”
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
“There are children who will leave a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of freedom!”
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
“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
“Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them. Only do that which insists on being done and runs right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you do it.”
Samuel Butler
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
“The comfort of it in her hours of leisure was extreme. She could go there after anything unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or some train of thought at hand. Her plants, her books…her writing desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach…she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.”
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
“Where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power to not act.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”
Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
