Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“People who want to write either do it or they don’t.”
Octavia Butler, Afterword to “Furor Scribendi,” Bloodchild and Other Stories
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Letter of Lord Acton to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887
“Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.”
“Love at First Sight,” Wislawa Szymborska
“Sometimes what you don’t understand keeps you from seeing certain obstacles and in not seeing them, you unknowingly scale them. If [my parents] had understood, they wouldn’t have pushed me so hard. And if they hadn’t pushed me so hard, I wouldn’t have been able to later dig my heels in and push myself.”
Nnedi Okorafor, Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected
“I listened to the music and the sounds from the streets and Daddy’s hand rested lightly on my hair. And everything seemed connected—the street sounds, and Ray’s voice and his piano and my Daddy’s hand and my sister’s silhouette and the sounds and the lights coming from the kitchen. It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.”
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
“I sometimes think how much the shaping of a destiny and the binding of a couple together depend on successful meetings and the avoidance of snares. A door which one thought was closed, a watch that is slow, a false step, a traffic jam, a sleeping car available…and your fate is settled…We walk across a cemetery of happiness missed for lack of a word, a gesture, an airy bubble; and how many people, meant for each other, have passed each other by in the fog?”
Maurice Goudeket, Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius
“There’s only one very good life and that’s the life you know you want and you make it yourself.”
Diana Vreeland, quoted in The Unexpurgated Beaton by Cecil Beaton, forward by Hugo Vickers
“Chasing petty happiness pushes greater happiness out of reach.”
Gretchen Rubin
