Jason Headley

This is a new place in your life. Clean and clear. Free from calamity created by every last ranch hand at the f*ckup farm. 

--from F*ck That: An Honest Meditation (2016)

Ben Vanheems

Gardeners are patient and kind people. Be proud of who you are!

Jack Kerouac

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you're already
in heaven now.
That's the story.
That's the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they're
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s'why I'll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

Samantha Bee

We just have to keep going. In this current era, it's not just TV people who have to find the energy to keep going—it's all people. We try really hard to be purposeful, but we do a lot of dick jokes, and that's okay too.

--Speaking at the closing session of the Public Library Association conference on February 29, 2020 

NEH

D: Hi, honey! Sweetie, love muffin, sugar plum...
N: What.
D: What?
N: Just tell me what you want. You're buttering me up for something, let's just get it out of the way. Tell me.
D: I want you to stop using the TV room as a closet. No more empty laundry basket, no hangers on chairs, no pants on the couch.
N: Fine. Done.
D: And I need for you to just clear a path in the office so I can get to the plants to water them. Please note that I am not asking you to clean up the office, I just need a path to get the plants.
N: Check.

Arne Naess

Claiming that something is impossible is nothing more than a temporary working hypothesis. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Don't be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time. 

Mary Norris

Greek has been my salvation. Whenever I have been away from Greek for a while and come back to it, it revives something in me, it gives me an erotic thrill, as if every verb and noun had some visceral connection to what it stands for. I like to think that the first letters were incised into clay and that writing therefore came from the earth. And because the earliest writing to survive was epic poetry, which invokes the gods, writing connects us earthlings to eternity.

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (2019), p. 15

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

~From We Were Made For These Times (Awakin.org)

Isabel Rogers

The harpist was setting herself up between the first and second violins and squidging the horns over a bit. She was extremely glamorous, and wore her jet-black hair scraped tightly into a bun on the very top of her head, into which she had pushed her orchestral pencil. Even though it was an ordinary Saturday afternoon in a rundown school in south London, she wore full and professional-level flawless make-up and radiated a perfume that made her nearest neighbours' throats itch. Her name was Bozenka.

David introduced the conductor to Bozenka before they started playing. 'Lovely to meet you,' said eliot, shaking a hand which clasped his in an icy ratchet grip. 'Thank you for coming along for your few bars of Mussorgsky. We very much appreciate it.'

'It is the way of the harp, to deliver perfection in tiny pockets,' said Bozenka in a heavily accented low voice. 'But what else can we do before death?'

Walking back to his podium, he tried to shake the feeling that death could be summoned by a harpist.

~Isabel Rogers, in Bold as Brass p.231

Clive Davis

There's gotta be misses. I didn't sign Meat Loaf.  He was an unlikely figure, visually. So I passed. 

"Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives" (2017). 

Randall Darwall

I think it's important to understand that process is a means to a way to discover what's most important in the end product and how can you adapt the process to really reflect your own point of view and your own unique personality. So I am always looking at each step of the process as a way to answer the question, "Why would I bother going through these extra steps?" Whether it's tying on, whether it's winding the warp on, whether it's choosing the weft, whether it's throwing the shuttle. [T]hey are answers that only human beings can discover in the act of doing it. [W]eavers tend to be looked upon as dinosaurs who are doing something that doesn't really need to be done. Why would you bother? I think that we have something to offer the world that is best expressed through interlacing threads. This is not busywork. This is not "happy hands and happy faces." This is very essential stuff. 

Craft in America, season 4, episode 1. 

Penny Reid

Stay away from the normals, the small-minded people who fill their brains with small-minded pursuits, who blend in and keep up with the Joneses. Those people will tear you down and make you boring. Instead, surround yourself with the weirds. With the misfits, oddballs, and outcasts. Because the normals, bless their hearts, have no idea how to have fun.

--Beard Science (2016)

Dalai Lama

Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace. 

Abra Berens

A bean plant's only goal is to create seed to ensure the next generation. Green beans are the immature seed pod of the plant, which wants to swell the seeds inside and allow them to dry, protecting the seed through the winter only to be activated by warm, wet soil in the spring and start again. I always anthropomorphize the plants after I pluck their seed pod--be it a green bean or ready tomato--imagining them to say, "Fine. I'll ripen another one."

--in Ruffage (2019). Chronicle Books. p. 222.