Ever since I was a kid, the days following Christmas left me in a slump. The winter blues come on strong when all of the excitement and togetherness of Christmas suddenly leave you as fast as the air in a popped balloon. And though my life is far from the same as it was last year, this year is just like all the rest in that respect.

So to get me through these times of low inspiration and gray weather, I decided it was time for a quote post, filled with all of my favorite words I’ve been collecting lately. I hope these may bring you the same pause, beauty and inspiration I felt when writing them down.

“‘Renate,’ they called, not because they were hungry or thirsty, but because she knew who she was, and as she knew who she was, she might also be able to identify them, with a smile and a word…”

-Anais Nin, Collages

“Liberation means entire freedom — freedom from the bondage of good, as well as from the bondage of evil. A golden chain is as much a chain as an iron one. There is a thorn in my finger, and I use another to take the first one out; and when I have taken it out, I throw both of them aside; I have no necessity for keeping the second thorn, because both are thorns after all. So the bad tendencies are to be counteracted by the good ones, and the bad impressions on the mind should be removed by the fresh waves of good ones, until all that is evil almost disappears, or is subdued and held in control in a corner of the mind; but after that, the good tendencies have also to be conquered. Thus the “attached” becomes the “unattached”. Work, but let not the action or the thought produce a deep impression on the mind. Let the ripples come and go, let huge actions proceed from the muscles and the brain, but let them not make any deep impression on the soul.”

-Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action via Brain Pickings

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”

-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking 

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

-Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This heart of mine keeps decent time
Though my ears may be weak
And my eyes may be all but blind
I still have sense enough to hear
And I’m not much without you near

I’ve paid my dues
Done one or two
But still it keeps a boiling down to you
So choose to be my victory, or vice
Oh either way I still want you here tonight

Heavens knows it’s hard to find another
Oh hell knows it’s got a home for folks like me
There will come a day
When the earth will cease to spin
You’ll hold me close and say
My god where have you been?

I’ve been around, old Chinatown
Happily lost but oh so easily found
They’re counting the stars above the hill
‘Neath some old moon, humming my tune
I’ll see you soon

-Shakey Graves, Chinatown

“The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.”

-Wendell Berry,  What Are People For? via Brain Pickings

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For more words to get you through, see here.

With love and wishing you joy for the new year,

Elizabeth