--IN THE END, EVERYTHING BECOMES A PLEA

 …I reread Anna Quindlen’s book, “A Short Guide To A Happy Life” again.  It had been a while.  The title is very accurate when it comes to describing what the book is.

I thought there were a ton of life lessons and reminders and thought you might appreciate seeing them:

“It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.”

“I show up.  I listen.  I try to laugh.”

“You cannot really be first rate at your work if work is all you are.”

“Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the sand dunes.”

“Remember that love is not a leisure, it is work.”

“Every time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be a human.”

“Realize that life is glorious and you have no business taking it for granted.  Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.”

“All of us want to do well.  But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.”

“Mortality is the greatest gift God ever gave us.”

“It is so easy to exist, instead of live.  Unless you know there is a clock ticking.”

“I have found that one horrible year has given me a perspective on all the things I wouldn’t have otherwise had.”

“After my mother died of cancer at age 40 when I was 19 I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.”

“C’mon, let’s honest.  Each of us has an embarrassment of riches.”

 “I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way.  I think of it in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close by.”

“Something really bad happened to me.  But it taught me that this life is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.”

“I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back, because I believed in it completely and utterly.  And I tried to that, in part, by telling others what I had learned, even though so many people thought I sounded Pollyanna.”

“Think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.”

“School never ends.  The classroom is everywhere.  The exam comes at the end.”

-- Anna Quindlen