My year in 101 quotes
A collection of favorite lines from my commonplace diary
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:
“If you're reading this you've lived through a f***ing plague.”
—@thatsusanburke“There's only one age: alive.”
—Agnes Varda, to Oliver Jeffers“The new rules for being alive kept changing.”
—Louise Erdrich, The Sentence“To get born, your body makes a pact with death / from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat”
—Louise Glück“When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner.”
—MFK Fisher, How To Cook a Wolf“So far, no good.”
—Olive Oyl, Popeye The Sailor Man“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“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“A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.”
—Goethe“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“Maybe I’ll read a book — it makes time be faster.”
—Jules Kleon“Being with myself is boring — I always know what's going to happen.”
—Owen Kleon“The only way I know I'm alive is if things happen that I haven't planned.”
—Marc Maron“Missing Man Joins Search Party Looking for Himself”
—BBC World News“Everywhere I went led me where I didn't want to be.”
—Paul Simon, on writing “Bridge over Troubled Water”“Is your mother worried? Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother?”
—Wet Leg“Texans aren't prepared for this kind of nightmare!”
—Hank Hill, “Snow Job,” King of the Hill“They were all in love with dying / they were doing it in Texas”
—Butthole Surfers, “Pepper”“Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.”
—Larry McMurtry“I was like a jellyfish and the internet had become my ocean.”
—Al Weiwei“Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.”
—H.L. Mencken“No love is like / any other love / so it would be insane / to make a comparison”
—Fiona Apple, “Ladies”“Compare and despair.”
—Beth Pickens“He ain't sick; but no, he isn't well either.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick“Of course, I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”
—Dorothy Parker“I wouldn't have gone in for writing if I hadn't liked talking to myself.”
—Larry McMurtry“Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
—Maggie Nelson, Bluets“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“Providence has bestowed upon children a power of voice, in proportion to their size, ten times greater than that of an adult.”
—William Gardiner“Babies and young children are the R&D division of the human species.”
—Alison Gopnik“It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!”
—Jules Kleon“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“Barren days, do no planting.”
—Farmer's Almanac“Plants may appear to be languishing simply because they are dormant.”
—The New Oxford American Dictionary“What was once dormant is now a creeping thing.”
—Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo“In my opinion, all artwork is stored energy. The art releases its power whenever a viewer becomes a dreamer.”
—Larry Bell“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“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“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“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“The stutter is a wild animal and it's part of my ongoing practice to follow it where it wants to go.”
—JJJJJerome Ellis“Remind yourself that ‘the lion while hunting doesn’t roar.”
—fortune cookie“I'm going hunting
I'm the hunter
I’ll bring back the goods
but I don't know when.”
—Björk“And if in earnest you have things to say / will hunting after words be necessary?”
—Goethe, Faust“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“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“If you don't see the book you want on the shelf, write it.”
—Beverly Cleary“But I — how should I dare? By whose permission?”
—Dante, Inferno“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“No reason is a perfectly good reason”
—McDonald’s radio ad“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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