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