Month: June 2014

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

George Eliot
George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans] (1819–1880), British novelist. Middlemarch, ch. 55 (1871-1872).

Hope likes justification, but can do without.

Mason Cooley
Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Ninth Selection, New York (1992).

Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. …If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943), U.S. poet. Black Women Writers at Work, ch. 5, by Claudia Tate (1983).

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

W.H. Auden
W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907–1973), Anglo-American poet. The Dyer’s Hand, pt. 1, “Reading,” (1962).

Somewhere along the line of development we discover who we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), U.S. First Lady, author, and speaker. As quoted in Eleanor and Franklin, ch. 23, by Joseph P. Lash (1971).

In a June 1941 letter to her friend Trude Lash.