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My year in 101 quotes

austinkleon.substack.com

My year in 101 quotes

A collection of favorite lines from my commonplace diary

Austin Kleon
Dec 28, 2021
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My year in 101 quotes

austinkleon.substack.com

Hey y’all,

One of the best things I did this year was start a 5 year commonplace diary for writing down one good line I heard or read every day. Here is a collage of some of my favorites:

  1. “If you're reading this you've lived through a f***ing plague.”
    —@thatsusanburke


  2. “There's only one age: alive.”
    —Agnes Varda, to Oliver Jeffers

  3. “The new rules for being alive kept changing.”
    —Louise Erdrich, The Sentence


  4. “To get born, your body makes a pact with death / from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat”
    —Louise Glück

  5. “When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner.”
    —MFK Fisher, How To Cook a Wolf


  6. “So far, no good.”
    —Olive Oyl, Popeye The Sailor Man

  7. “And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.”
    —Jenny Offill, Weather

  8. “The days move with regularity, over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next. A long, continuous chain.”
    —Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver

  9. “A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.”
    —Goethe

  10. “How long will things be the same? Surely I will be awake, I will sleep, I will be hungry, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end? Do all things go in a circle?”
    —Seneca

  11. “Maybe I’ll read a book — it makes time be faster.”
    —Jules Kleon

  12. “Being with myself is boring — I always know what's going to happen.”
    —Owen Kleon

  13. “The only way I know I'm alive is if things happen that I haven't planned.”
    —Marc Maron

  14. “Missing Man Joins Search Party Looking for Himself”
    —BBC World News

  15. “Everywhere I went led me where I didn't want to be.”
    —Paul Simon, on writing “Bridge over Troubled Water”

  16. “Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother?”
    —Wet Leg

  17. “Texans aren't prepared for this kind of nightmare!”
    —Hank Hill, “Snow Job,” King of the Hill

  18. “They were all in love with dying / they were doing it in Texas”
    —Butthole Surfers, “Pepper”

  19. “Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.”
    —Larry McMurtry

  20. “I was like a jellyfish and the internet had become my ocean.”
    —Al Weiwei

  21. “Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.”
    —H.L. Mencken

  22. “No love is like / any other love / so it would be insane / to make a comparison”
    —Fiona Apple, “Ladies”

  23. “Compare and despair.”
    —Beth Pickens

  24. “He ain't sick; but no, he isn't well either.”
    —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  25. “Of course, I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”
    —Dorothy Parker

  26. “I wouldn't have gone in for writing if I hadn't liked talking to myself.”
    —Larry McMurtry

  27. “Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
    —Maggie Nelson, Bluets

  28. “To give a group a chance to be together... give them the chance to be alone... There must be some way in which the members of the family can be together, even when they are doing different things…”
    —A Pattern Language

  29. “Providence has bestowed upon children a power of voice, in proportion to their size, ten times greater than that of an adult.”
    —William Gardiner

  30. “Babies and young children are the R&D division of the human species.”
    —Alison Gopnik

  31. “It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!”
    —Jules Kleon

  32. “If you think you're burned out, you're burned out, and if you don't think you're burned out you're burned out. Everyone sits under the shade of that juniper tree, weeping, and whispering, ‘Enough.’”
    —Jill Lepore

  33. “Barren days, do no planting.”
    —Farmer's Almanac

  34. “Plants may appear to be languishing simply because they are dormant.”
    —The New Oxford American Dictionary

  35. “What was once dormant is now a creeping thing.”
    —Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

  36. “In my opinion, all artwork is stored energy. The art releases its power whenever a viewer becomes a dreamer.”
    —Larry Bell

  37. “The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams... To read poetry is essentially to daydream.
    —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  38. “In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — don’t be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”
    —Michaela Coel

  39. “We don't suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say.”
    —Gilles Deleuze

  40. “I just hear silence as rhythm. When it's not there... anything can happen. I like the stuttering part of putting pauses into things... Little ways to stop and figure out what's next.”
    —Laurie Anderson

  41. “The stutter is a wild animal and it's part of my ongoing practice to follow it where it wants to go.”
    —JJJJJerome Ellis

  42. “Remind yourself that ‘the lion while hunting doesn’t roar.”
    —fortune cookie

  43. “I'm going hunting
    I'm the hunter
    I’ll bring back the goods
    but I don't know when.”
    —Björk

  44. “And if in earnest you have things to say / will hunting after words be necessary?”
    —Goethe, Faust

  45. “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.”
    —Henry David Thoreau

  46. “You can't know it ahead of time — you're giving space for something to freely arise that wouldn't have arisen if you hadn’t created that space.”
    —Iain McGilchrist

  47. “If you don't see the book you want on the shelf, write it.”
    —Beverly Cleary

  48. “But I — how should I dare? By whose permission?”
    —Dante, Inferno

  49. “Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
    No matter who you are.
    Only you can authorize yourself….
    No one else can authorize you.
    No one.”
    —Verlyn Klinkenborg

  50. “No reason is a perfectly good reason”
    —McDonald’s radio ad

  51. “You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”
    —Martha Graham


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