Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things.”
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
“The farm was a form: not like a set of rules on a wall, but like the symmetry of winter and summer, or like the balance of day and night over the year, June against December.”
Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved
“Everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”
Alberto Giacometti, Giacometti: A Biography
“I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I’d made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone.”
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
“Why some things—a word, a glance, a scene glimpsed from a window, a random memory, a fragrance, a conversational anecdote, a fragment of music, or of a dream—have the power to stimulate us to intense creativity while most others do not, we are unable to say.”
Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
William Morris
“I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grape-fruit.”
Helen Keller, The World I Live In
“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“So often you have to run away from home and visit other homes first before you can clearly see your own.”
Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own
Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.
Gretchen Rubin
