Saturday ~ February 15, 2020

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

(Annie Dillard, b. 1945)

Friday ~ February 14, 2020

The thing is to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it, and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it...
Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you again.

(Ellen Bass, b. 1947)

Thursday ~ February 13, 2020

Hatred is a passion requiring one hundred times the energy of love. Keep it for a cause, not an individual. Keep it for intolerance, injustice, stupidity. For hatred is the strength of the sensitive. Its power and its greatness depend on the selflessness of its use.

(Olive Moore, 1916 - 1970)

Wednesday ~ February 12, 2020

Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind always grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is that they are the touchstone of sincerity and hypocrisy, and they bring things and people to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undisclosed.

(Thomas Paine, 1737 - 1809)

Tuesday ~ February 11, 2020

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.

(Cynthia Heimel, 1947 - 2018)

Monday ~ February 10, 2020

New Yorkers will excuse me for missing my barred owls, fuffed grouse, and snowshoe rabbits, my grosbeaks and deer. I love what you love too. In the city and in the country there is a simple, underlying basis ti life which we forget almost daily: that life is good. We forget because losing it or wife, children, health, friends is so awfully painful, and because life is hard, but we know from our own experience as well as our expectations that it can and ought to be good, and is even meant to be good.

(Edward Hoagland, b. 1932)

Sunday ~ February 9, 2020

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

(Dorothy Day, 1897 - 1980)