self-care
Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good , ed. Adrienne Maree Brown (Chico, CA, 2019), 138.
You should think of your energy as if it’s expensive, as if it’s a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it. Not everyone has invested in you in order to be able to have the capital for you to care about this. What you spend your energy on, that’s the day.
New Heights podcast, August 13, 2025.
I should add…that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive, of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking.
The Art of Loving (New York: Perennial Library, 1974), 95–96.
To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it.
The Art of Loving (New York: Perennial Library, 1974), 93.
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
“Everything I Know About Writing Poetry,” in A Hundred White Daffodils (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), 141.
I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Part of it is just learning what makes me happier and doing more of it, and learning what makes me unhappier and doing less of it.
interview, The Happiness Project
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace.
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 81.
The vampires in your life can’t be cured. Your best bet is to stay away from them. As Lynda Barry said, “You cannot fix Dracula by trying to convince him to just party in the sun with you.”
Now that I’m here, my greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care. My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were the army dentists who came back from World War Two and believed that the dental office was a battle ground. You have a better chance at dental health. And I say this because you want at night to be pacing the floor because your fuse is burning inside of you, because you want to do your work, because you want to finish that canvas, because you want to make that design, because you want to help your fellow man. You don’t want to be pacing because you need a damn root canal. So, floss. You know, use salt and baking soda. Get them professionally cleaned if you can afford it. Take care of your damn teeth.
Commencement speech, Pratt Institute, May 17, 2010.
We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there.
The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 2.
I cannot follow you where I will not go.
The Book of Questions, Vol. 1 [The Book of Questions, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book] (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 385.