:: QUOTE-A-DAY

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."
- Vita Sackville-West

"We live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right."
- Rebecca Solnit

"We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
- Henry James

"Growth itself contains the germ of happiness."
- Pearl S. Buck

"The heart is the only broken instrument that works."
- T.E. Kalem

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."
- Salvador Dali

"Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life."
- Dolly Parton

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."
- J.K. Rowling, commencement speech

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for."
- Epicurus

'"We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all."
- Lorrie Moore

"When I began writing, the words that inspired me were these: 'A writer is someone who has written today.' If you want to be a writer, what's stopping you?"
- J.A. Jance

"Young love is about wanting to be happy. Old love is about wanting someone else to be happy."
- Mary Pipher, Love in the Time of Dementia, The New York Times

"It is well known that the longer one postpones a pleasure, the greater the pleasure is when one finally gets it. Therefore, if one postpones it forever, the pleasure should be infinite."
- Saul Gorn

"We're a country enthralled by happy endings or, failing that, acceptable endgames. But it's hopeful beginnings that may have the most power of all."
- Charlie Suisman, Manhattan User's Guide

"My go-to worldview is pessimism. I see a Times Square billboard promoting a musical that has its audience 'dancing in the aisles' and I can't help but think, 'That is a fire hazard.'"
- Sarah Vowell, "The Pessimism Deficit" (NYTimes, 2/20/06)

"Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote."
- George Jean Nathan

"The way you express your love is who you are."

- Charles Mee, True Love

"And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave."

- LeRoi Jones, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"

"The best thing a child can do with his toys is break them."

- Hegel