“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”

Saul Bellow

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“Members of some ancient tribe or other had the custom of placing either a black or a white pebble into a jar at the end of every day, depending on whether the day had been bad or good. A sensible custom. At the end of someone’s life his jar was turned upside down and it could then be seen if it had been a happy or unhappy life. Instead of that stone ritual, I could write in this exercise book at the end of every day: life is beautiful, or miserable, or difficult, or delightful, or whatever. I’ll do that for a whole month. Very curious to see how it will turn out.”

Etty Hillesum

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“Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?”

Jack Gilbert

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“Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

Edward Abbey

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“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

Anaïs Nin

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“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Thornton Wilder

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“I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”

Jeanette Winterson

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“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is.”

Dudley Clendinen

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“He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandons himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”

Marguerite Yourcenar

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“Geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night.
        But it is this gleam which is everything.”

Henri Poincaré

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“Cities have lived lives, too, and when you walk them, you begin to see exactly who they have become.”

Richard Goodman

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“We don’t really know it, but we sense it: there is a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route.”

Tomas Tranströmer

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“Every one of us lives a life we did not expect to live. We begin with passions and dreams and with the basic conviction that all will turn out for the good, more or less. Some of it does turn out for the good. Most of it, though, is a startling combination of the unexpected and the inconceivable. Every door we walk through introduces us to a strange land, and then we set about seeing if this is a place where we can grow.
        For me, New York City has been the great opened door.”

Richard Goodman

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“There’s been a few times of flying through the air in a Mercedes upside down and hitting the ground three times where you do kind of sort of get the hint that maybe this is it. But if it ain’t it, then you just carry on with life, right? I mean…we all bump into death at one time or another, honey.”

Keith Richards

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“How little is needed for happiness! The note of a bagpipe. — Without music life would be a mistake.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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