If things turn upside down

trust your heart if the seas catch fire,
live by love though the stars walk backward

ee cummings

For the summer

"Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean." 

-John Muir

Wrinkles are Battle Scars

"I may be a caricature of my former self; I’m still wearing wide-belted plaid coats, horn-rimmed glasses, and turtlenecks in the summertime. So what? Nobody cares but me. I don’t see anything wrong with face-lifts or Botox or fillers. They just erase the hidden battle scars. I intend to wear mine, sort of."

-Diane Keaton from memoir, Let's Just Say it Wasn't Pretty

Blossom First

"The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes."

-Mark Nepo

Things often continue how they start

"As in the beginning, so in the middle, so in the end."

-Buddhist saying

Learning to write...

"It is free of verbosity, of ambiguous language gussied up as brilliance. It doesn’t contain any banal insights delivered as revelation. There is no subliminal messaging to the reader about the flattering ways in which the author should be viewed. These omissions are rare ones, especially in personal essays and debut fiction."

Alice Gregory on Marina Keegan

The opposite of loneliness...Marina Keegan

"We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats."

"We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement."

-Marina Keegan's Essay

More on her here

Beg, Borrow, Steal

"Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.

-Jonathan Lethem


"Bad poets imitate, great poets steal."

-TS Eliot

Lethal Combination

"If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it's lethal."

-Paulo Coelho

Thick of Thin Things

"At times we may feel mired down by personal inadequacies - both real and imagined- sometimes counting calories more than counting blessings, worried more about scrapbooking than service, often too over scheduled to really listen to those around us, and caught in the thick of very thing things."

-Kristin M. Oaks

Real Fiction

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

- C.S. Lewis 

Miracles

"There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other as though everything is a miracle."

-Albert Einstein

True or False

“The universe is big. It’s vast and complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.”

— The Doctor, Season 5, Episode 12

Whole

"We are not meant to be perfect. We are meant to be whole."

- Jane Fonda

To Become Spring

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

- The Little Prince 

Less is More

"Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words."

-Mark Twain

Thou was not born for death

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick, for home,
She sood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlon."

John Keats

Rewrite

"Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying."

-John Updike

Spot Their Joy

"One of the most helpful things you can do for your friends — for anyone, really, is to spot their joy. There have been times when friends have said to me, "You totally light up when you talk about that!" And I'm like, "I DO, don't I?! Ya, maybe I should pursue that more, or make more time for that, or put that at the top of the list." To have my joy reflected back to me, to be seen in that way -- it's a powerful affirmation of being on track."

-Danielle LaPorte

Soil

"I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that are concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it was… And I think that’s why she struggled with love. She couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t hold on to it and make sure it never changed.”

- Carrie Ryan, The Dead-Tossed Waves