hope.

Silverstein decided which of his homes to live in during a given month by reading the signs of the world around him: which friends were around, the flavor of pudding served at nearby restaurants that week, the ratio of sunshine to wind. He was a wanderer.

~Heidi Sistare: Attention, Attention

Tell me if you think this is true: it is easier to accept defeat and try to make the wreckage look beautiful than to keep fighting and lose.

~Jamie Quatro, “Georgia the Whole Time,” I Want to Show You More

Then the summer of bad times when I pounded on doors, got fed-up, and bingo they offered me a job sight unseen from Staunton, and bingo my father and my best friend croaked within a week of each other, and bingo I held on for dear life.

~Breece D’J Pancake.

Marion Field, The Complicated Manners: Memories of Breece D’J Pancake

Sometimes it helps to lie. You tell yourself a story, even when you don’t know the ending.

~Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Pheonix”

“The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen.”

~Brad Leithauser, Why We Should Memorize

~Michael Pollen, “The Wendell Berry Sentence That Inspired Michael Pollan’s Food Obsession”

“A promise unkept will take a man’s mind. It does not matter whether the promise is made by a woman or a territory or a future foretold.”

~Claire Vaye Watkins, “The Diggings,” Battleborn

“You’ll find you’re always tumbling over things you’ve put behind you,” he said.

~D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

“… a powerful rhetoric insists that we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones.”

~Leslie Jamison, “Fog Count”

There can be as much beauty in short (words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters) as long. Sparrows fly higher than peacocks.

~Matt Haig, 30 things to tell a book snob

Americans simply don’t know one another very well, but that has never stopped us from making judgments about how one another should live. 

~ Jessie Kissinger, Who Do You Know—An Esquire Poll

“My goal is to understand what human is,” Ishiguro says. “By making a copy of a human, we can understand humans.”

That’s Not a Droid, That’s My Girlfriend, Aubrey Belford

What elevates someone’s work from “technically excellent” to “truly great” is the extent to which you feel like you’re seeing them live their truth, be fully themselves. 

~Karen McGrane, Give a Crap. Don’t Give a Fuck

“Public women, and feminists in particular, have to be everything to everyone; when they aren’t, they are excoriated for their failure.”

~Roxane Gay, The Meaning of Leaning

Dogs tell the truth; people tell a story. The beauty of a dog is he’s having a relationship with the real you. ~Cesar Millan

Rescuing Cesar, Men’s Journal

Any deep sadness, any great triumph, any shattering blow, any expansive happiness – all offer possibilities for growth and the necessities of adjustment. This is what human beings do if they want to survive. It turns out that the heart is rubber bandish, stretching and snapping back, and much stronger than it looks or seems.

~Emily Rapp, on Ronan’s blog: 10/2/12

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: it’s our goddamned story!

~Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

But if we don’t explore the rest of the world—if we don’t get outside our work and wander into whatever weird corners we fancy—we’ll never be able to give our work life. ~Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Novelty