“Kiss your own fingertips
and hug your own curves.
You are made of waves and honey
and spicy peppers when it is necessary.
You are a goddess,
I hope you haven’t forgotten.”

Emery Allen

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

-Charles Horton Cooley

“Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere.

Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us

our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us if it may be

in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us

strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be

brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath.

And in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of

death, loyal and loving to one another.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

-Junot Diaz, How I Write

“The laws of our land are catching up to the fundamental truth that millions of Americans hold in our hearts: when all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.”

-President Barack Obama

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that

it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the

excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the

holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all

moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

-Frederick Buechner

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

All I want to be
is a person who makes things
and thinks about them.

-John Maeda

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

-John Steinbeck

“Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really.”

-Gertrude Stein