QUOTES 3/17

I have truly done nothing today. Absolutely nothing. (Besides cleaning my room and making a killer breakfast, I guess.) I think we’re going to the beach tomorrow and will quarantine there for a few days — it’s relatively unpopulated, and we will be staying to ourselves the whole time. I don’t know if that is socially irresponsible but I think it’s fine? Anyways. I don’t think anybody really knows what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” outside of avoiding crowded places and isolating yourself if you have any symptoms. Now I’m just rambling.

I want so badly to avoid this sinking feeling, but at times it just seems impossible to make sense of everything going on. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Gilda Radner quote I put in yesterday’s post. “Delicious ambiguity—” what a phrase. All we can do is keep going— picking out small happinesses along the way.

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“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”  - Sylvia Plath

“Yeah, anything could be art. Anything could be beauty....And that's turning life into - you know, finding not only beauty - amusement, joy, fun. Finding fun where sometimes it's just a bore; finding fun when it's a burden. You can always make something look different. Which is a way of saying that I'm, in a way, protected from being unhappy.” - Agnes Varda

“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.” - E.M. Forster

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.” - Anne Lamott

“Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It's not a dialectical idea, it's a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, 'We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.” - Agnes Varda

“You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.” - J.D. Salinger

“You can either practice being right or practice being kind.” - Anne Lamott

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” - Franz Kafka

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?” - John Updike

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” - Franz Kafka

QUOTES 3/16

Ah, life amidst a global pandemic. What’s a girl to do.

I’ve been struggling a bit lately, maybe in a shallow sort of way. I just can’t wrap my mind around this new reality of social isolation. The world is changing and paradigms are shifting and people are hurting and all the toilet paper is gone.

I’ve been finding inspiration and comfort in quotes of people who continue to inspire me— mainly female comedians and poets, but also others. I want to make a heroic attempt at accumulating these words and putting them here everyday (maybe ten a post? IDK).

These quotes have challenged and encouraged me to keep writing, creating, laughing, weeping, smiling, and questioning the world around me. They continue to chisel away at my preconceived notions, reservations, cynicisms, and grievances.

I know it is blindly optimistic of me to commit to anything that hints at a daily routine. But! There is so much content online at all times to consume that I am already overwhelmed (and guilt-ridden and embarrassed and blushing) at the thought of contributing to the ever-expanding pile! So, if I am less consistent, that’s great too! Either way I win! Onward!

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“Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented. So, to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise.” - Maya Angelou

“I think being boring is just the worst sin of all time.” - Elaine Stritch

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world.” - Susan Sontag

“I want to say thank you to my mother, who said to me, 'Darling, you can be whoever you want to be, so long as you are outrageous.’” - Phoebe Waller-Bridge

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.” - Gilda Radner

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” - Audre Lorde

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” - Susan Sontag

“The mental faculties that allow us to shape and mold and innovate are the very ones that dispel the myopia that would otherwise keep us narrowly focused on the present. The ability to manipulate the environment thoughtfully provides the capacity to shift our vantage point, to hover above the timeline and contemplate what was and imagine what will be. However much we’d prefer it otherwise, to achieve ‘I think, therefore I am’ is to run headlong into the rejoinder ‘I am, therefore I will die.’” - Brian Greene

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” - Jane Hirshfield

“Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.” - Mary Oliver