—YOU’RE THE FIRST PERSON TO EVER CALL ME BACK

 

…I trust you had a great New Year’s and a wonderful weekend.

Yesterday was not what I was hoping it would be, but today’s another day, so there’s that.

And here are some things I like to start a new year…

 

“In 2022, this planet is still full of more magic and beauty than we could know in a lifetime. That’s more than not nothing- that is everything. We still have everything, right here, right now. I love you all.” Maggie May Ethridge

  

"Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering 'it will be happier'." Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  

“Don’t cry because it’s over Smile because it happened.” Dr. Seuss

  

“Fail, fail again, fail better.” Samuel Beckett

 

“The act of writing is the part that feels like flying.” Kim Liao

 

“Someone has to be published, why not you?”

 

“You need brute courage in life as well. You really have no other choice but to persevere. I mean, what do you do? When things knock you down, you can hide in the closet and chew on your raincoat, or you can pick yourself up and go on. One of these is by far a better look. It’s not courage, it’s necessity.”

 

“What else can you model as a human being except not to live a timid life?” --Jacquelyn Mitchard

 

“This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me.” Emily Dickinson

 

“The world is violent and mercurial...it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love...love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” Tennessee Williams

 

“I don’t trust anyone who isn’t at least a little neurotic.” Bell Hooks

 

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would be no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion 

 

“You’ll be happy to know that today I was only mildly depressed.” Roethke 

 

“Look, I don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you’ve got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you’re not alive.” Mel Brooks

 

“We tell stories in order to live.” Joan Didion