Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you anyway.”
James Baldwin, The Paris Review
“In the Hall of Gems at the Museum of Natural History in New York, I once stood in front of a huge piece of sulfur so yellow I began to cry.”
Diana Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.”
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
“How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, “The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!”
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
“To walk is something much larger than a list of advantages you can read in an ad for vitamins…Why do we walk? Where do we walk from and what is our destination? We all have our own answers. Even if you and I walk next to each other, we can experience the walk differently.”
Erling Kagge, Walking One Step at a Time
“I realized I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. It was the happiness of the right-before, when everything is potential and no branch on the tree of possibility has yet been closed off by action.”
Dawn Drzal, The Bread and the Knife
“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
“‘Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.'”
Virginia Woolf, Haunted House
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
