I keep a weekly journal and each week write down a quote. Sometimes it’s from a book I’m reading or a notable in the news. Or something I think will help motivate me — and I need it many days! I love sharing these with everyone.
January:
“I hope there are days when your coffee tastes like magic, your playlist makes you dance, strangers make you smile, and the night sky touches your soul. I hope you fall in love with being alive again.” Brooke Hampton
“There becomes a point when silence is betrayal.” Prince Harry
“If you pour some music on whatever’s wrong, it’ll sure help out.” Levon Helm
“Never become so thirsty that you drink from any cup that’s presented to you. Be selective. Be smart. Be wise.”
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Toni Morrison
February:
“Ask yourself this when you are ready to quit on your dreams. Are we quitting because we simply know we can’t accomplish them or are we quitting because we are scared of what happens if we don’t.” Nels Peterson, Cowboy Sayin
“The door to my heart will always be open, but I’ve renovated the porch and you’ll have to step up to reach it these days.” Stacie Martin
“And if you don’t think you have anything to be grateful for, keep looking, because you don’t just receive optimism. You can’t wait for things to be great and be grateful for that. You’ve got to behave in a way that promotes that.” Micheal J. Fox.
“I think the best possible way that you can look old, out of touch, and stupid is by criticizing the generation below you. It’s just something that’s always been done and it is the single most boring possible way you can age.” Elizabeth Gilbert
March:
“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something … my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.” Jimmy Carter
“The reader, the bookworm, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.” Theodore Roosevelt
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
April:
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alife. You will be dead soon enough.” Ernest Hemingway
“Your beliefs don’t make you a better person. Your actions do.”
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” Ursula K. LeGuin
“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves. It is not my nature.” Jane Austen
“There is little success where there is little laughter.” Andrew Carnegie
“It’s hard to get moving from a dead stop, but you must. Break the inertia.”
May:
“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in hour hand and melting like a snowflake.” Francis Bacon
“My library is an archive of longings.” Susan Sontag
“With gratitude, optimism is sustainable.” Micheal J. Fox
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” E.L. Doctorow
“Too severe an application to study sometimes brings on lunacy and frenzy, in those especially who are at a somewhat advanced age.” Adam Smith
June:
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” Fernando Pessoa
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rainer Maria Rilke
“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” F. Matthias Alexander
“Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Carl Sandberg
“If you have a talent, use it in every way possible. Don’t hoard it. Don’t dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly, like a millionaire intent on going broke.” Brendan Francis
July:
“A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibilities of their own souls.” Walt Whitma
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all endurance.” James Baldwin
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all miseries of life.” W. Somerset Maugham
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” George Orwell
August:
“We think our world into being.” Thomas Lloyd Qualls
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself or, like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” Gustave Flaubert
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Kurt Vonnegut
“One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through and it will be someone else’s survival guide.” Brene Brown
“No matter how slow your progress, I promise you, the effort you are making will get you there.”
September:
“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.” Milan Kundera
“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” Paulo Coelho
“I will tell you how I began to be a writer. I was a reader.” Toni Morrison
October:
“Get up. Dust off. Yell ‘Fuck!’ Start again.”
“Two thousand years from now, people will not understand the difference between a ‘butt dial’ and a ‘booty call’ and this is exactly why the Bible is hard to understand.”
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.” Stephen Covey
“I don’t care what anyone says, living alone as a woman is one of the most perfectly luxurious experiences of my life.” Heather O’Neill
November:
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You are only free when you realize you belong no place – you belong everyone place.” Maya Angelou
“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” EB White
“You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book and he considers it sacred, but has never read it.” Frederich Nietzsche
December:
“Do not lose hope. What you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” Neil Gaiman
“They always say ‘time changes things’ but you actually have to change them yourself.” Andy Warhol
“I think there is pressure on people to turn a negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say ‘I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.’” Marian Keyes
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Anne Lamott
Connecting. Creating. 
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