Quotes for 2024

As is my habit, I write a quote in my planner every week of the year. Sometimes they reflect current events, or happenings in my life, or deaths or just life. Sharing them all with you!

January

• “Someone tried to steal my spark once. They lost everything in the fire.”
• “Invitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”  Oscar Wilde
• “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution.“ Aristotle
• “Never forget that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

February

• “My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.” Judy Blume
• “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl
• “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• “My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.” Henry Rollins

March

• “Take big, audacious action in the direction of your dreams and do not let the fact that you’re wetting your pants stop you.” Jen Sincero
• “My top three pieces of writing advice? Stop whining and write. Stop fucking around and write.  Stop making excuses and write.”  Nora Roberts
• “At the end of your time here, you will either have lived as a tablemaker or a wall builder.” John Pavlovitz
• “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” MLK Jr.
• “The universe will match whatever vibration you put out. And you can’t fool the universe.” Jen Sincero

April

• “Misery might love company, but so does joy. And joy throws much better parties.” Bill Ivey
• “It was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  Howard Thurman
• “Experiment: Make yourself alert for small miracles, beguiling surprises, marvelous tweaks, inexplicable joys and subtle changes that inspire quiet awe.” Rob Brezney

May

• “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
• “There are thousands of worlds in all of us. Gorgeous, terrible, wild, contradictory, imaginative  fascinating worlds.  To know someone deeply is to know a universe contained in their skin. “ Victoria Erickson
• “Never be afraid to sit a while and think.”  Lorraine Hansberry
• “You don’t become cooler with age but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way to actually be cool. Call it the Geezer’s Paradox.”  Widdershins Smith
• “We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t and then you need to kick that fucking door down.”  Vice President Kamala Harris

June

• “Never be a prisoner of your past.  It was a lesson, not a life sentence.”
• “Make sure you don’t start seeing yourself through the eyes of those who don’t value you. Know your worth even if they don’t.”  Thomas Davis
• “The miracle is this. The more we share, the more we have.”  Leonard Nimoy
• “This is what I have seen to be good and fitting: To eat and drink and enjoy oneself in all of ones labor in which he toils under the sun during the few years of life God gives us; for this is his reward.”  Ecclesiastes  5:18
• “Being a writer is cool because it’s like always having homework and then you die.”  Adapted from Lawrence Kasdan
• “Trust is that not only have a story with writing but the ability to write it all down.”

July

• “If you aren’t hearing opportunity knock, perhaps you need to build a door.”  Nels Peterson, Cowboy Sayings
• “If you are tired, keep going.  If you are scared, keep going.  If you are hungry, keep going. If you want to taste freedom, keep going.”  Harriet Tubman
• “Read, read, read.  Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad.  And see how they do it. Juyst like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”  William Faulkner
• “Once you hit a certain age, you become permanently unimpressed by a lot of stuff.”

August

• “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?  You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Kamala Harris
• “In giving, you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.”  Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• “It’s hard to free fools from the chains they revere.”  Voltaire
• “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”  Eleanor Roosevelt
• “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”  Leo Tolstoy
• “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”  Kurt Vonnegut

September

• “Never forget that your capacity to fight for justice and your capacity to love most stay intertwined.”
• “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”  Paulo Coelho
• “When one day I go happily to meet my creator, he will say to me ‘show me your wound.’ And if you have no wounds, he will say ‘was nothing worth fighting for?’  You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.” Nancy Pelosi
• “Our world is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion.  Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender or religion.”  Nelson Mandela

October

• “If you feel pain, you’re alive.  If you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.”  Leo Tolstoy
• “In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain active long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”  Edith Wharton
• “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”  David Brooks
• “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”  George Orwell
• “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

November

• “Ask yourself about the kind of life you want. What would you do day-to-day and with whom, and where?  Consider the life you have.  Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.”  Maggie Smith, author Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change
• “A vote is a kind of prayer about the kind of world you want to live in.”  Rev. Raphael Warnock
• “I do not have time for things that have no soul.”  Charles Bukowski
• “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”  Leo Tolstoy
• “When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant.”  Thomas Jefferson
• “In three words, I can sum up everything I have learned about life.  It goes on.”  Robert Frost
• “’Stay angry, little Meg’ Mrs. Whatsit whispered. ‘You will need all your anger now.’”  Madeleine l’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

December

• “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”  Gloria Steinem
• “When someone cooks for you, they are saying something. They are telling you about themselves:  Where they came from, who they are, what makes them happy.”  Anthony Bourdain
• “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”  Anais Nin
• “Women are taught to be too many things that contradict each other, so I’ve decided to just be strange and powerful.”  Shafera Leira