Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
John Steinbeck
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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.
Jane Kenyon
more infosource: “Everything I Know About Writing Poetry,” in A Hundred White Daffodils (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), 141.
category: advice, creativity, school of life, self-care, solitude
medium: nonfiction
“I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, ‘Put in some tooth twine.’ I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me. It had been a long search, but it was worth it.”
E. B. White
more infosource: Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 81.
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category: dental floss, love, marriage, soul mate, travel, wife
medium:
notes: This recollection is recorded in the notes for Chapter IV, “The Most Beautiful Decisions,” 1929–1930
“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.”
Mark Frauenfelder
more infosource: interview, The Happiness Project
category: happiness, school of life, self-care
medium: interview
Mark Frauenfelder
more info“Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness then daffodils.”
Cyril Connolly
more infosource: The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 17.
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category: autumn, cycle of life, leaf, nature
medium: nonfiction
notes: Ernest Hemingway described The Unquiet Grave as “a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.”
“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.”
Thomas Merton
more infosource: Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 81.
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category: activist, balance, demand, peace, school of life, time, violence
medium: nonfiction
“‘Carpe diem’ doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. ‘Carpe diem’ means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be ‘cape diem,’ if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things…Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day.”
Nicholson Baker
more infosource: The Anthologist: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 127.
category: advice, carpe diem, Horace, Latin, school of life, translation, typo
medium: Novel
via: Whiskey River“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: “Plato; or, the Philosopher”
category: influence, originality, quotation
medium: Essay
via: Austin Kleon“Your habits reflect your identity, so if you struggle to change a particular habit, re-think your identity.”
Gretchen Rubin
more infosource: pre-publication notes for her forthcoming book Better Than Before; more info here
category: growth, habit, identity, routine
medium: author website
“My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV.”
Leonard Cohen
more infosource: Songwriters on Songwriting by Paul Zollo (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003).
category: Department of Motor Vehicles, music, songwriting
medium: Interview
Lynda Barry
more infosource: ARTNews, “How Non-Artists Can Draw: Comics Great Lynda Barry on Teaching Creativity,” by Nicole Casamento, June 5, 2014.
category: arts, creativity, drawing
medium: Magazine
“Don’t let anyone say there aren’t magic words.”
Siri Hustvedt
more infosource: The Blazing World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 17.
category: change, influence, magic, quotation, reading, transformation, words
medium: Fiction
“It is much better for a writer to be underrecognized than over, in terms of keeping one’s head down, like the proverbial Japanese nail, so that one might observe the world unhammered and unimpeded. Abjure fame and avoid obscurity. But between those extremes lies the perch where a writer occasionally might do some good work. There’s a Jack Butler Yeats painting I love, showing a wild celebration of St. John’s Eve in western Ireland, with Yeats and J. M. Synge standing in the background, watching and looking small and out of the picture. Yet it was they who created the picture, and a good deal more.”
Roger Rosenblatt
more infosource: “Please Turn to the Chapter on Obscurity . . .,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2014.
category: audience, fame, obscurity, recognition, writing
medium: newspaper essay
“If you’re given the tools, you have a responsibility to use them. I’m doing what I’m cut out to do, the best thing I can do, until they throw dirt on me.”
Kris Kristofferson
more infosource: “Kris Kristofferson Is Still Living His Epic Life,” by Turk Pipkin, Esquire, May 12, 2014.
category: calling, creativity, inspiration, music, school of life, work
medium: magazine profile
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