One for each week (give or take) from my weekly planner:
January
“We are all unfinished stories wandering in this vast library searching for the chapter where we finally find home.” May Aygun
“If you don’t feel ready for resolutions and new beginnings, you’re right on time. This is the season of hibernating, dreary rest, and turning inward. Listen to your heart and your intuition. The magic of winter is an important part of the sacred spiral.” Unknown
“Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think might possibly make you happy, even for a little while, whatever the cost of good sense might dictate.” Anthony Bourdain
“I am no longer shrinking myself to be more digestible. You can choke.”
“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It’s a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness, and other signs of insecurity.” Jimmy Carter
February
“I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.” Charles Dickens
“I hope that you will go out and let stories happen to you and that that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” James Madison
“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened, and why the world blew up under them.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
March
“The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.” Erasmus, 1509
“You’re raising the volume in your voice but not the logic in your argument.” Vladimir Zalensky
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President or that we ought to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” Theodore Roosevelt
“The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians because those people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.” Madeleine L’Engle
April
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Alvin Toffler
“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” John Locke
“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” Carlos Casteneda
“This is not a left or right moment. It is a right or wrong moment.” Senator Cory Booker
“Look closely at the present you are constructing; it should look like the future you are dreaming.” Alice Walker
“You can also commit injustice by doing nothing.” Marcus Aurelius
May
“If America hasn’t broken your heart, then you don’t love her enough.” Cory Booker
“Hope is a renewable option. If you run out if at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.” Barbara Kingsolver
“Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.” (Little by little, the bird makes its nest.)
“One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient.” Charles M. Blow
“I am pieces of all the places I have been and all the people I have loved. I’ve been stitched together by song lyrics, book quotes, adventures, late night conversations, moonlight, and the smell of coffee.” Brooke Hampton
“Don’t quit one meter before you strike gold. Keep moving forward and creating the life of your dreams.” Prince
June
“You cannot follow both Christ and the cruelty of Kings. A leader who mocks the weak, exalts himself, and preys on the innocent is not sent by God. He is sent to test you. And many are failing.” Pope Leo XIV
“Start before you’re ready. Waiting for the right time is fear in disguise.”
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” Anaïs Nin
“To be called ‘woke’ in a world that sleeps through suffering is no insult.” Pope Leo XIV
“Exister, c’est oser se jeter dans le monde.” (To exist is to dare to throw oneself into the world.) Simone de Beauvoir
July
“You gotta normalize telling your friends you love them. Tell them a lot. Make it weird.”
“There are two places you should go to offer: The place that heals you and the place that inspires you.”
“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.” Stephen King
“I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” Arthur Ruberstein
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
August
“Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate.” Ozzy Osbourne
“We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.” Luciano de Crescenzo
“The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.” Henry Ward Beecher
“You cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” John F. Kennedy
“Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.” Jean de la Fontaine
September
“There is but one solution to life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.” Mary Shelley, The Last Man
“If you can do more, you should.” Robert Redford
“Fear may visit in the mornings (or the night). But it is not your truth. It is only the shadow of a story that no longer defines you.” Unknown
“Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things and trying to make life worth living, and I know I don’t have to believe in everything, but I believe in that.” Nikita Gill
October
“It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation, in retrospect, will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.” Kurt Vonnegut
“A sense of freedom is something that, happily, comes with age and life experience.” Diane Keaton
“I will dream; I will take my mind out of it’s iron cage and let it swim – this fine October.” Virginia Wolfe
“Travel is not a reward for working. It’s education for living.” Anthony Bourdain
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” Vincent Van Gogh
November
“I know as a woman I’m supposed to be afraid of getting older, but I love this shit so much. Every year I sink deeper into the bath of unapologetic realness and it’s amazing.” Bunmi Laditan
“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.” Jane Goodall
“The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.” Mark Twain
“Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow – whether there is a market for it or not.” Kurt Vonnegut
December
“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.” Winston Churchill
“Life is mostly froth and bubble./Two things stand like stone./Kindness in another’s trouble,/Courage in your own.” Adam Lindsay Gordon
“If the woman I was 5 years ago could see me right now, she’d be so proud.”
“When someone cooks for you, they are saying something. They are telling you about themselves: Where they come from, who they are, what makes them happy.” Anthony Bourdain
“Don’t wait until you’ve reached your goal to be proud of yourself. Be proud of every step you take towards reaching that goal.” Karen Salmansohn
Connecting. Creating. 
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