Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects,–to have the sweet, and leave the bitter untasted,–that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger,–but I carry no ugly wounds.”
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
“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
“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
“Sartaj was thinking about how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.”
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games
“There is a place in me I haven’t gone yet.”
Gail Godwin, notes when starting her novel Flora
“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
“Yet occasionally we discover in the folds of an old handkerchief a shell or insignificant stone that had once embodied our happiest of afternoons.”
Patti Smith, Just Kids
“When asked, “What disturbs him now about himself?” E. B. White answered, ‘I am bothered chiefly by my little fears that are the same as they were almost 70 years ago. I was born scared and am still scared. This has sometimes tested my courage almost beyond endurance.’”
E.B. White, quoted in “Notes and Comment by Author,” by Israel Shenker, New York Times, July 11, 1969
“Nothing is more becoming to the mind than its own natural manner; from this proceeds its ease, its grace, and all its powers, whether real or apparent. All constraint injures it to force its springs, destroys it. We all carry about us indices of our destiny; these must not be effaced, but watched, if our career is not to be a miserable failure.”
Joubert, Pensees
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything…we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to realize it as such.”
Henry Miller, The Henry Miller Reader
“We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one’s life without a sense of time is to squander it.”
Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler No. 66
“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
Willa Cather, My Antonia
“The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers.”
Mary Oliver, “Habits, Differences, and the Light That Abides,” Long Life
“It is never easy to confront life-changing news, especially when you are deeply embroiled in the everyday and the banal, which we always are. They absorb almost everything, make almost everything small, apart from the few events that are so immense that they lay waste to all the everyday trivia around you.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 2
