Marti Michalis

"What's great about a bloodhound is they make you laugh every day. These dogs are the funniest dogs ever."

Maira Kalman

Spalding High-Bounce Pink Ball
Working in my studio and sitting at a desk, painting or writing, I need to take breaks. And throwing the ball against the wall is one of the greatest diversions and brain reactivators around. The Pinky High-Bounce is a perfect product and the balls don’t leave marks on the wall. Whenever my nieces and nephews come over — and soon my grandchildren, who are almost old enough — we all throw the ball against the wall, not caring if something breaks. In my apartment, we throw it over the bed against the wall in my bedroom. That’s my favorite place, everybody’s very happy, and there’s a lot of screaming.

Linit Starch, Rowenta Professional Micro Steam Iron
I’m a big ironer and I could talk about ironing at great length. As I said, getting into bed is one of the great moments of life. But it has to be in a beautifully made bed with white linens that are starched and ironed. Which is something that I love, love, love to do. I use liquid starch in a spray bottle and I iron my pillowcases with it so that when I get into bed — which I do very early to read, talk on the phone, or watch British murder mysteries — it’s just one of those glorious experiences. I iron everything. That’s kind of the legacy of our family and it’s something that the women did back in Belarus. Who knows if they were washing by the river or what. But anyway, even with my son Alex Kalman, the joke is that we iron our underpants. And napkins, of course. If you don’t iron your napkins before putting them on the table, that’s a tragedy. If you can walk everywhere, iron, and mail letters, that’s a nice life.

--from "What Illustrator Maira Kalman Can't Live Without" (https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/maira-kalmans-favorite-things.html)

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