Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
Mary McCarthy, “The Vita Activa”, The New Yorker, October 18, 1958
“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
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”
St. Therese of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul
“I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering.”
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“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 Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
“The fact is that very few things have so much effect on the feeling inside a room as the sun shining into it.”
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
“I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason to attempt them.”
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book)
“’It’s not easy to start over in a new place,’ he said. ‘Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.’”
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
“That is Morning. To cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, March 27, 1838
“There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body an appetite for enjoyment.”
Joseph Joubert, Pensées
“The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”
Ralph Ellison, a quote from Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1963) edited by George Plimpton
“In a curious way spirit must sometimes follow body, just as at other times spirit leads.”
Pearl Buck, A Bridge for Passing
“A house has a physical definition; a home has a spiritual one.”
Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book)
“It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.”
Franz Kafka, Aphorisms (Amazon, Bookshop)
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Amazon, Bookshop)
“Our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental thing for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Amazon, Bookshop)
“Hurry, hurry, open every door! says my heart.”
Mary Oliver, “Habits, Differences, and the Light That Abides,”
“It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light.”
G. K. Chesterton
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin, Paris Review Interviews, II
“The opposite of a profound truth is also true.”
Gretchen Rubin
