A gift: a compilation of quotes that have been living in my Notes app for the last several months

postcards, pretty string, smoothing over tissue paper from gifts, stowing away multi-colored jute and dried flowers, creating running lists that go one forever... (My latest list is a record of all of the songs I wake up with stuck in my head. Perhaps I’ll share that one with you all at some point, who knows.) But one of my running lists for the last many months—since spring! —has been a collection of quotes I’ve read, quotes I’ve found, quotes that have been given or sent to me… and I’ve wondered, gosh, where will I put these?

So: here. A gift. From me to you. To carry in your pocket.

Your body knows a poem before your mind does.
—Yrsa Daley-Ward

The Earth is like a child who knows poems by heart.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.
—E.B. White

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
—Louise Erdrich

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
—Voltaire

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
—Zelda Fitzgerald

When small men begin to cast big shadows it means the sun is about to set.
—Lin Yutang

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
—Adrienne Rich

Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering.
—Eckhart Tolle

Van Gogh didn’t say: “That’s just an old chair.” He looked, and looked, and looked.
—Eckhart Tolle

When we pass into a deep of the mind, the soul follows its desire and attaches to ordinary earth, for the soul, as the old saying goes, follows the path of water and likes low places.
—Robert Bly

We’re all just compost moving through the world.
—Julia Butterfly Hill

I understand now that love is always the fall.
—Lidia Yuknavitch

Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.
—Fritjov Capra

Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.
—Alice Notley

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is Immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
—Edward Abbey

Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found.
—Lao Tzu

Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival—this is humanity’s challenge now.
—Eckhart Tolle

Work is love made visible.
—Kahlil Gibran

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
—Gertrude Stein

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
—Edith Wharton

Resilience is when you address uncertainty with flexibility.
—Drew Houston

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything you’ve ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear.
—George Addair

I don’t define success as having a good name or being wealthy. I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit.
—Sinead O'Connor

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
—Mary Oliver

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
—Willa Cather

You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works.
—Pope Francis

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self’.
—Olga Tokarczuk

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
—Vincent Van Gogh

We are made kind by being kind.
—Eric Hoffer

I am a great friend of chaos. It’s all we have. I mean, this whole concept of being able to manage life...life is risk, life is chance, life is being open to chance. The best things in my life, and probably in anybody’s life, come out of being open to being blown off course.
—Tilda Swinson

Courage doesn’t always roar.
—Mary Anne Radmacher

Being engaged is a way of doing life, a way of living and loving. It's about going to extremes and expressing the bright hope that life offers us, a hope that makes us brave and expels darkness with light. That's what I want my life to be all about—full of abandon, whimsy, and in love.
—Bob Goff

Learn character from trees, values from roots, and change from leaves.
—Tasneern Harneed

Things that are hard to bear are sweet to remember.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca

When I think of my life and all its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
—Albert Camus

I don’t ever want to gatekeep what I share in my Substack, but these postings do take time to compile—sometimes quite a bit of time—so I decided that this may be a good alternative. If you would like to “tip” me for any of the time it took to write this, if you felt moved or supported by it, you can buy me a coffee <3