...These things are your becoming.

"The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming." -Sugar; Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column

...make that self over and over...

"In life, we have to make ourselves. In art, we have to make that self over and over again and present it to the world. We have to put it up on the wall or down on the page or project it on a screen or allow it to resound or glide or crackle across the room. And each time we do that, we must endure the sense that perhaps all has failed, that no one wants this, that we are too much that. Too ordinary or female or obsessed with turtles or experimental or rural or Jewish or derivative or slutty or neurotic or sentimental or gay or Jesus-worshipping or Asian or emotionally restrained or outside-the-whole-MFA-thing or linguistically dense or offensively lewd or just incredibly stupid and weird and boring. / Each time!" -Sugar; Dear Sugar

...all the magic I have known...

"But all the magic I have known / I've had to make myself." -Shel Silverstein; Where the Sidewalk Ends

What has writing taught you?...

"'What has writing taught you?' 'How to be fierce. How to forgive. How to see the world spinning from another perspective. How to build a sacred hut. How to find and hold ten thousand versions of the truth. How to fail. How to work incredibly hard on the smallest, most invisible thing. / How to be quiet and scared and brave.'" -Sugar; 50-in-50

To use our individual...

"To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—-the very half that makes rising necessary-—is having first been nailed to the cross." -Sugar; Dear Sugar

What if you allowed your God...

"What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?" -Sugar; Dear Sugar

we must find words...

"we must find words / or burn" -Olga Broumas; Beginning with O

Make no little plans...

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work. Remembering that noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die." -Daniel H. Burnham

How wonderful it is...

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -Ann Frank

We are what we repeatedly do...

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle

The harder you work...

"The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender." -Vince Lombardi