Sue Poole

As I've gotten older, my style has grown bolder. I'm always telling my kids, 'You don't have to conform to trends,' because it's really just a marketer's tool, isn't it, the trend? I wish I had known earlier to follow the beat of my own drum.

https://cupofjo.com/2023/05/04/sue-poole-style/

Calvin (a.k.a. Bill Watterson)

 Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That's the one thing we know for sure in this world. 

But I'm still going to gripe about it. 

Calvin and Hobbes, Monday, July 17, 1995.

Ligaya Mishan

In a profile about Annette Bening:

While in high school, Bening did some secretarial work for her father, who was teaching classes on Dale Carnegie’s principles of salesmanship. Foremost among them: being interested in other people. The key is not faking it. You have to genuinely care.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/19/t-magazine/annette-bening-nyad-netflix.html

Kim France

Ms. France distilled the key to their quick-to-ignite but enduring love this way: "The reason it works is we both think we're the one who got lucky."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/style/kim-france-paul-green-wedding.html

Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Q [Library Journal]: Compared to your process for writing fiction and nonfiction, what was different writing the memoir?
A [Viet Thanh Nguyen]: My nonfiction has been scholarly, and there is little benefit to being vulnerable, emotional, or subjective in scholarship. To survive in the academy, I had to tamp down any signs of vulnerability or emotion and to present myself purely as a rational, objective, theoretical intellect. No body, no feeling, only highly controlled thought. For a woman, or a person of color, to do any less is to open oneself to the colonizing, racist, sexist assumption that feeling is less than thought, body is less than mind, spirit is less than intellect. So I had to undo a lifetime of Westernized education to allow myself to write a memoir.

--In an interview about the author's forthcoming book A Man of Two Faces, due for publication in October 2023.

Dr. Janina Fisher

If it's not happening now, it's not happening.

Tara Westover

Q (NYT By the Book): How do you organize your books?

A (Tara Westover): By genre! I want so badly to be one of these people whose books are arranged by color. They photograph so well! And I have this notion that it would be very pleasant to sit in a room of books ordered by shade and hue, like a wall of paint samples. 

 

But it could never work. It would go against how I actually use my library. Every few days I wander up to my shelves with a hankering of one sort or another, thinking some thing like, "Today I would like to read an essay," or "Today perhaps a short story." But I have never once approached my shelves with the thought, "Today I would like to read a book that is yellow."

Eleanor Hamby and Dr. Sandra Hazelip

Hamby (81 years old) and Hazelip (82 years old) travel the world together, most recently on a Jules Verne-inspired 80-day around-the-world trip.

NYT: What advice would you give to people who have been dreaming of an adventure like yours?

HAZELIP: Get up out of your easy chair. Step out of your comfort zone. Make some plans and live.

HAMBY: Age is only a number. If you think you want to try something, don't be afraid to step out. Do it. Because you're going to regret if you don't, and you will never regret if you do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/travel/travel-the-world.html

Thomas Jefferson

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise.

Unattributed

In antiquity, modest utilitarian objects, whether household or personal, were often treated by craftsman with the same creative attention and skill as monumental art.

--Description of a hand mirror, Greek, 500 to 480 BC, bronze. The J Paul Getty Museum: Handbook of the Antiquities Collection (2002), page 109.

Anna Quindlen

A finished person is a boring person.

Thomas Moore

The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.