Rebecca Solnit

Hope isn’t confidence that everything will be fine, but it is confidence that not everything will be awful. Optimism is the belief that everything will be fine, and often it won’t. The Soviet Union broke up, but look at Russia now.

Uncertainty doesn’t mean, “trust to the future to take care of itself,” or that just because good things happened historically, good things will happen again. Good things happened because people organized, took initiative and intervened, refused, stood up, or just were generous and engaged. The good things don’t happen of themselves, but there’s evidence that we’re capable of making them happen.

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/05/solnit-crisis-pandemic-coronavirus-paradise-built-in-hell/

Eknath Easwaran

Use your sense of suffering as a powerful motivation to help relieve the suffering of others.

Bruce Daisley

Q: Almost everyone I know says they're having trouble concentrating. Any advice?

A: There was a Harvard Business Review article a couple of days ago saying that, if you're feeling constantly exhausted right now, don't be surprised. This is a common experience of grief. When people feel a low level of anxiety through the day, it does manifest in our physiognomy. It does manifest in us feeling exhausted by the emotional drain of it. So let's not drive ourselves into the ground right now. Let's at least use this opportunity to reflect on what's important, rather than trying to retain unsustainable levels of performance in such a singular and wretched time.

Bruce Daisley, author of Eat Sleep Work Repeat (2020), in a Q&A on March 31, 2020 (washingtonpost.com). Bruce Daisley is a vice president of Twitter.

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.