Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“The years from 7 to 13 seem to be particularly formative. We are young enough to be innocent and impressionable, yet old enough to think and feel deeply about what is happening to us.”
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School
“I didn’t entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made the school look like a museum, and that’s exactly what it was to me, and what I did not want it to be. In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.”
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
“Even paradise must have rules.”
Mary Oliver, “Flow,” Long Life
“Forever—is composed of Nows—”
Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist Part II
“I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.”
Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young
“It is not always in this world the people who bring us fine roses to whom we are most friendly.”
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
“I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organise and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my ‘ten minutes.’ I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.”
Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”
Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
“Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas
