1. “Today you are you, that is truer than true.  There is no one alive who is you-er than you.”

2. “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

3. “Only you can control your future.”

4. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”

5. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

6. “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

7. “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

8. “You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

9. “If things start happening, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along and you’ll start happening too.”

10. “And the turtles, of course…all the turtles are FREE. As turtles and, maybe, ALL creatures should be.”

The world breaks everyone and, afterward, many are strong at the broken places.
(A Farewell to Arms)

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Never mistake motion for action.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Courage is grace under pressure.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
(For Whom the Bell Tolls)

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
(The Wild Years)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925- 89 years ago today! It’s one of my favorite books and had me entranced with New York City long before I moved here. In honor of its birthday, I gathered some of my favorite quotes from the novel.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

“There are all types of love in this world, but never the same love twice.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

Today, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I thought I’d share some of his most inspiring quotes.  His words of wisdom are poignant, powerful, and timeless.

1. “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

2. “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

3. “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

4. “The time is always right to do what is right.”

5. “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

6. “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”

7. “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

8. “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”

9. “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

10. “Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

(photo source)