A PORTRAIT A DAY KEEPS MYSELF SANE

There are plenty of people dragging themselves miserably through the world, because they are clogged and fettered with work for which they have no fitness…I can’t help believing that nothing is better than to find one’s work early and hold fast to it, and put all one’s heart into it.
Sarah Orne Jewett

Adventure-seasoned and storm-buffeted,
I shun all signs of anchorage, because
The zest of life exceeds the bound of laws.

Claude McKay

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
 W. Somerset Maugham

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.
 Charles Bukowski

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’ other had slept a wink!
      The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
      Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.

Eugene Field

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
Dorothy L. Sayers

Searching for what I need, and I don’t even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don’t have and I’ve been searching for.
Ivo Andric

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

Sigfried Sassoon