Tag: Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN
Life Magazine
May 24, 1963
 
 
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
 
 
 
 
The more you know, the more you can create.
JULIA CHILD
 
 
 
 
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
“Furor Scribendi,” Bloodchild and Other Stories
 
 
 
 
For me, the challenge of middle age was not to stand still.
JON KATZ
A Dog Year
 
 
 
 
In a time of destruction, create something.
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
The Fifth Book of Peace
 
 
 
 
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
RALPH ELLISON
Writers at Work 08: The Paris Review Interviews
 
 
 
 
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
 
 
 
 
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
LEO TOLSTOY
“Three Methods of Reform”, Pamphlets
 
 
 
 
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.”
Samuel Johnson
(The Rambler No. 68)
 
 
 
 
Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather. Circumstances have not allowed me to make a good summer for myself this year…My summer has been overcast by my own heaviness of spirit. I have not had any adventures, and adventures are what make a summer.
Robertson Davies
“Three Worlds, Three Summers,” The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies
 
 

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
It seemed that one had little control over one’s own destiny. All one could do was to get on with the one job that nobody else could do, the job of being oneself.
MONICA DICKENS
Mariana
 
 
 
 
Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening and sometimes they arise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people.
JAMES SALTER
Burning the Days
 
 
 
 
What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of Night
 
 
 
 
Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.
JENNY ODELL
How To Do Nothing
 
 
 
 
In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
“On Love”
 
 
 
 
One does not ‘find oneself’ by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be.
MARY SARTON
The House By the Sea
 
 
 
 
Remember every room has its gloom and the great thing to do is to find the color that will cut that gloom.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Everybody’s Autobiography
 
 
 
 
A red flower placed in a window may expand its influence over all the area of your sight.
ROBERT HENRI
The Art Spirit
 
 
 
 
There’s a big difference between fresh air and an air freshener.
GRETCHEN RUBIN
Life in Five Senses
 
 

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann’s Way
 
 
 
 
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
EDITH WHARTON
A Backward Glance
 
 
 
 
So plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
“You Learn”
 
 
 
 
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
 
 
 
 
It seemed that one had little control over one’s own destiny. All one could do was to get on with the one job that nobody else could do, the job of being oneself.
MONICA DICKENS
Mariana
 
 
 
 
The great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.
MARIO MANLIO ROSSI
“The Essay on the Character of Swift”
 
 
 
 
Snow on water: silence upon silence.
JULES RENARD
Journal
 
 
 
 
His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry ‘To-day, to-day,’ like a child’s.
WILLA CATHER
Death Comes for the Archbishop
 
 
 
 
My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers and I do things.
HOPE JAHREN
Lab Girl
 
 
 
 
A quest is more fun than a jaunt.
Beautiful tools make work a joy.
One day, now will be a long time ago.
Sometimes, to keep going, we have to allow ourselves to stop.
GRETCHEN RUBIN
Life in Five Senses
 
 

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
Bad luck in small doses can cast a glittering light on the rest of life.
ANN PATCHETT
“Sometimes the Luck in in the Fall”
 
 
 
 
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
 
 
 
 
Every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
 
 
 
 
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
 
 
 
 
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
 
 
 
 
Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either…Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.
DAG HAMMARSKJOLD
Markings
 
 
 
 
Beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see.
JOHN GREEN
The Anthropocene Reviewed
 
 
 
 
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
JOHN RUSKIN
The Stones of Venice
 
 
 
 
One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
 
 
 
 
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
WALLACE STEVENS
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird,”
The Palm at the End of the Mind
 
 
 
 
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.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
 
 
 
 
Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and me only.
W. H. AUDEN
“Reading,” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays
 
 
 
 
The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.
ANNE TRUITT
Turn: The Journal of an Artist
 
 
 
 
If you ever want to keep up a grudge against someone, don’t see that person alongside beautiful flowers.
JAMAICA KINCAID
My Garden (Book)
 
 
 
 
Change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.
RACHEL KUSHNER
The Mars Room
 
 
 
 
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro
 
 

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
It is curious how the act of writing leads to confession.
SIGRID NUNEZ
The Friend
 
 
 
 
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state: we must be doing something to be happy.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
“One the Pleasure of Painting” Table Talk
 
 
 
 
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
 
 
 
 
Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
ZORA NEIL HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
 
 
 
 
It isn’t enough to love, we must prove it.
ST. THERESE OF LISIEUX
Story of a Soul
 
 
 
 
The fire had burned to embers, the company was gone. We walked in the icy darkness with the old, limping dog. Nothing on the empty road, no cars, no sound, no lights. The year turning, cold stars above. My arm around her. Feeling of courage. Great desire to live on.
JAMES SALTER
Burning the Days
 
 
 
 
It may well be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Painting as Pastime
 
 
 
 
The brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy.
THÉRÉSE DE LISIEUX
Story of a Soul
 
 
 
 
I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else.
MICHAEL FRAYN
A Landing In The Sun
 
 

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
The world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
TONI MORRISON
Tar Baby
 
 
 
 
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
 
 
 
 
Tidying is the act of confronting yourself; cleaning is the act of confronting nature.
MARIE KONDO
Spark Joy
 
 
 
 
It is impossible to cover up anyone who is asleep, without feeling deep tenderness.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
The Soul of Kindness
 
 
 
 
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
 
 
 
 
Whenever people ask me for advice, I tell them two things: Never give up on your dreams, and do your homework.
ANDRE LEON TALLEY
The Chiffon Trenches
 
 
 
 
A library is a medicine cabinet. What can heal one person may not work at all for somebody else.
SANDRA CISNEROS
A House of My Own: Stories from My Life
 
 
 
 
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
An Autobiography
 
 
 
 
There are unheralded tipping points, a certain number of times that we will unlock the front door of an apartment. At some point you were closer to the last time than you were to the first time, and you didn’t even know it. You didn’t know that each time you passed the threshold you were saying good-bye.
COLSON WHITEHEAD
The Colossus of New York
 
 
 
 
The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR
The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table
 
 
 
 
What we perceive as limitations have the potential to become strengths greater than what we had when we were ‘normal’ or unbroken…when something breaks, something greater often emerges from the cracks.
NNEDI OKORAFOR
Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected
 
 
 
 
In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.
MARY OLIVER
Upstream: Selected Essays
 
 
 
 
She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it).
LEWIS CARROLL
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
 
 

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
The constant remaking of order out of chaos is what life is all about, even in the simplest domestic chores such as clearing the table and washing the dishes after a meal … but when it comes to the inner world, the world of feeling and thinking, many people leave the dishes unwashed for weeks so no wonder they feel ill and exhausted.
MAY SARTON
Recovering
 
 
 
 
No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The Life of Samuel Johnson
 
 
 
 
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.
ZORA HEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
 
 
 
 
No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.
QUENTIN CRISP
The Naked Civil Servant
 
 
 
 
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
 
 
 
 
Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend.
KEITH DOUGLAS
Alamein to Zem Zem
 
 
 
 
On holiday it is the reversing of normal habits that does one so much good.
R. C. SHERRIFF
The Fortnight in September
 
 
 
 
If one says ‘Red’ (the name of a colour) and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.
JOSEF ALBERS
Interaction of Color
 
 
 
 
It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types—people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing—are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.
LAURIE COLWIN
The Lone Pilgrim
 
 
 
 
In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense.
DALAI LAMA
Ethics for the New Millennium

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organise and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits.
RUMMER GODDEN
A House with Four Rooms
 
 
 
 
The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers.
MARY OLIVER
Long Life
 
 
 
 
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
Syracuse University Commencement Address, 2013
 
 
 
 
The things that we love tell us what we are.
THOMAS MERTON
Thoughts in Solitude
 
 
 
 
I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to Elizabeth Holland, 1856
 
 
 
 
One of the pleasures of getting older is that one can get so much nearer to one’s own people, and that the dear ones of them become dearer all the time.
WILLA CATHER
The Selected Letters of Willa Cather
 
 
 
 
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
 
 
 
 
I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.
JAMES BALDWIN
Nothing Personal
 
 
 
 
To be interested in the changing seasons is … a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
“Justification of Art”
 
 
 
 
I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.
ALBERTO GIACOMETTI
Giacometti: A Biography
 
 
 
 
Though still very far from being perfect girls, each was slowly learning, in her own way, one of the three lessons all are the better for knowing – that cheerfulness can change misfortune into love and friends; that in ordering one’s self aright one helps others to do the same; and that the power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Jack and Jill
 
 
 
 

“Proverbs of the Professions”
Stunt coordinator: If you’re not working, you’re training.

Emergency manager: Disaster is the wrong time to exchange business cards.

Poker player: If you can’t spot the fish at the table, you’re the fish.

Photographer: Zoom with your feet (get closer to a subject rather than zoom onto it).

Restaurant manager: If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.

Teacher: The children who are hardest to love need it most.

Rancher: Always leave a gate the way you found it.

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

 
 
The best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.
MINDY KALING
Why Not Me?
 
 
 
 
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.
JOHN CAGE
Silence: Lectures and Writings
 
 
 
 
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
ANNIE DILLARD
The Writing Life
 
 
 
 
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
 
 
 
 
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
 
 
 
 
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
 
 
 
 
If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Stranger
 
 
 
 
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
THOMAS MERTON
The Journals of Thomas Merton
 
 
 
 
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.
IRIS MURDOCH
The Sea, the Sea
 
 
 
 
There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate—not a grain more.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Autumnal Tints
 
 
 
 
We are happy when we are growing.
GRETCHEN RUBIN

Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
An Inland Voyage
 
 
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
 
 
He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried. You would not call such a man rich, neither would I call happy the man who is so without realizing it.
EUGENE DELACROIX
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
 
 
Whatever fate befalls you, do not give way to great rejoicings or great lamentation; partly because all things are full of change, and your fortune may turn at any moment; partly because men are so apt to be deceived in their judgment as to what is good or bad for them.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
 
 
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Selected Writings
 
 
Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
“A New Refutation of Time”
 
 
We lived the whole of our early lives under the rule of postponement: life was not in the present, it was always ahead of us. Somewhere in the future we would be the people we intended to be.
DIANA TRILLING
The Beginning of the Journey
 
 
When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Gilead
 
 
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
WALTER BENJAMIN
“The Storyteller”
 
 
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.
JOHN CAGE
Silence
 
 
I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable.
NAN FAIRBROTHER
The House in the Country
 
 
An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.
MARK TWAIN
Notebook
 
 
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
WILLA CATHER
My Antonia
 
 
I have not been inordinately materialistic, but I am attached to my house, to my inherited belongings, and to the things that I have chosen for myself. All these objects add complexity to my emotional ties to the people with whom I have shared, and share, my life, and to my aspirations for myself.
ANNE TRUITT
Turn: The Journal of an Artist
 
 
Happiness not in another place, but this place…not for
another hour, but this hour…
WALT WHITMAN
Leaves of Grass
 
 
To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
The Social Contract
 
 
I shall never forget how the red ball of the sun hung on the horizon and raced along with the train for a short space, and then plunged below the belly-band of the earth. There have been other suns that set in significance for me, but that sun! It was a book-mark in the pages of a life.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
 
 
You can’t run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero’s journey.
ANNE LAMOTT
Twelve Truths I Learned from Writing to Life
 
 
What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.
The days are long, but the years are short.
The most important step is the first step.
Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.
GRETCHEN RUBIN