"I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget the way you made them feel." -Maya Angelou
“To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“In order to empathize with someone’s experience, you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not as you imagine their experience to be.” -Brene Brown
Kurt Vonnegut, on something an archaeologist said to him when he was a young man: "I don't think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them." And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn't been talented at anything enough to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could win at them.
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." -Ghandi from a poster on a teacher's door at our local high school
"You need a lot of quantity time for quality moments."
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." -Helen Keller
"Books, she has found, are the way to live a thousand lives—or to find the strength in a very long one." -Addie Larue
"I simply don’t know what to do; my brain cannot handle any more impressions or thoughts, it can’t take in anymore, I don’t know anything, I don’t feel anything, I don’t understand anything. I have the feeling that something terrible has happened to me during these months, but I don’t know much about it. I don’t know anything about the world at all." -Franz Kafka
"Though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, and my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but I still hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever want to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting." -David Sedaris
"Repetition is not failure. Ask the waves, ask the leaves, ask the wind." -Mark Nephi
"Over 107 years I've faced other problems. Living is a problem. You do what you need to do to handle the problem that's in front of you at this moment. It's hard to say this, but you have days where you'd almost welcome death because you've been here long enough. So be it.” -from 107 yo Joe during the coronavirus pandemic
"Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to avoid it." -from The Copyeditor’s Handbook about rearranging a sentence so you don’t have to deal with a weird plural possessive, but good for life too
"You can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the ending." -C.S. Lewis
"The purpose of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit." -a proverb from the book Rodham
"Do all the good you can to all the people you can in all the ways you can." -Hillary Clinton in the Hulu documentary about her
"The more crap we go through, the more we have to offer to people going through crap."
"Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a long time making it."
"Life without revision will silence your soul."
“You always own the option of having no opinion.” -Marcus Aurelius
"I want to write about marriage. I think the most interesting story is how men and women get on with each other, the terms they accept to live together and survive together, the compromises they make, the betrayals of themselves and of each other, and how despite the fact that over and over again they find that it can’t possibly work, it still seems to be preferable to anything else they know about. In the end, it becomes rather heroic." -Jules Feiffer
"What is man? A mindless speck of confusion wondering aimlessly in a meaningless void."-a quote Roz Chast’s mom had hanging near her desk from the book Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
From the book The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers
“Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise and being disruptive of some status quo.“
Mr. Rogers’s grandpa would say to him, “Freddy, you make my day very special.”
Jesus was truthful about his feelings—he wept, got discouraged and sad. Greatest sin to him was hypocrisy.
A message delivered in story form is much more powerful than a sermon or admonition.
"Whatever is mentionable is manageable."
"I hope you’ll be able to look for all the different ways that people have of showing that they love you."
Fred rogers believed the most effective gift we can give to young children is to nurture their capacity for self-discipline
Had hard teen years with his 2 boys and wife Joanne said “You know, we are just four different people living in the same house.”
Received lifetime achievement award in 1997 at Emmys. At end of his speech, he said “Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are?
From the book Olive Again:
"And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect."
"I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing."
From the book Camilla about the wife of LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball:
Their 2yo son Eddie got polio in fall 1933. Local doctors in Arizona didn’t think that's what it was, but he was eventually diagnosed by a specialist in Los Angeles. Time of quarantine was 3 weeks, had 3 days left. Eddie put in isolation on his 3rd bday for the remaining 3 days. Camilla said he “screamed himself hoarse for us but we could only comfort him through a crack in the door during the short visiting hours, singing and telling him stories. No one who has not experienced it can know the devastating heartache I felt. We walked back-and-forth on the hospital grounds powerless to do anything. We rented a room in a home across the street where we watched and waited for the time to pass. The terror and anguish of those days remain vivid.”
After Eddie was out of isolation, Spencer had to return to work, Camilla stayed another 10 long, lonely weeks in LA. Three children at home (ages 15, 11, 6) cared for by her sister Mary who was deaf and “did not hear the bickering that sometimes went on among the three children at home.” Spencer encouraged kids to write daily.
Sometimes Eddie's condition improved, sometimes it slid back. One man commented “how many times a day does he say 'mama'? I tried to count them and it’s thousands.” She entertained Eddie with songs and stories and games day after day.
Eddie came home in December, Camilla’s had learned to splint his legs, massage and exercise them. Two years later when he started school, he was walking in front of the playground slide when a boy coming down struck his leg just above the ankle and broke it.
For the next eight years summers involved trips to LA for Eddie’s check ups and operations on his legs and feet.
One of their friends asked "Why did this have to happen to you? You’ve always lived such a good life." But Camilla did not see illness as God’s punishment, nor necessarily as a specific test of faith or strength. Perhaps those were the true explanations, but so far as she could see, the Lord left a great many things to operation of natural causes – a matter of infection and too little resistance, with the Lord letting us make of experience what we can.
From the book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking:
"Love is essential; gregariousness is optional." -Mahatma Gandhi
"In a gentle way, you can shake the world." -Gandhi
"It’s always been private occasions that make me feel connected with the joys and sorrows of the world, often in the form of writers and musicians I’ll never meet in person."
“That fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude” -Proust
"Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything." -Robert Rubin from In an Uncertain World
"Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the persons capacity to act." -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
From the book News of the World:
“A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude."
"He had begun to look up on the human world with the indifference of a condemned man. Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen so many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten."
From the book Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West
"The end of all right institutions, whether the home or the church or an educational establishment is the development of the human soul." -Reverend Anna Howard Shaw
“Women may be found who seem to glory in their enthralled condition, and who caress and fondle the very chains and manacles which fetter and enslave them!
"Let’s go—I’ve had enough waking hours for one day." -Moira from the series Schitt’s Creek
"If it is to be, it’s up to me." -comedian Fortune Feimster via a podcast she was on
"You get in life what you have the courage to ask for." -Oprah Winfrey
"Just imagine tomorrow. This is going to be over." -Tyra Banks’ mom
"Think before you speak. Read before you think." -Fran lebowitz
"The first step that leads to our identity in life is not usually 'I know who I am' but 'I know who I am not.' Process of elimination." -Matthew McConaughey
"Adlon is not afraid to convey that most of the emotion generated in the act of parenting is not love." -from New Yorker article about the TV show Better Things
From the Armstrong & Getty Show podcast:
"Try not to wave the white flag on life."
"When the Lord starts blessing, the devil starts messing."
Gather your hall of champions— Think of people who are a great support to you when you’re feeling down and imagine what they would say to you about your trouble or frame of mind.
"I hate it when I get what I deserve."
"Well I’ll be! If it isn’t the consequences of my own actions!"
"Why do the things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?" (quote from The Simpsons)
From social media:
"Listen, am I the most attractive girl out there? Of course not. But do I have a good personality? No. But do I wake up every day and try to be the best person I can be? Also no."
"I hate this whole 'women can be sexy at 50' narrative. At what age will society stop demanding I try to be hot and just let me turn into an old swamp witch as nature intended?"
"Stop acting like people didn’t ignore their kids before cell phones."
"I heard too many sounds at once and now I am a bitch."
"Your shit is your shit. It’s not less because other people’s is more." -My Favorite Murder Instagram post
Shirts from Ross of Vlog Creations: "Everything happens for no reason" and "Always give up"
Church quotes:
"As a historian, I try to follow the advice of a British novelist. He said: 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there' (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between [1953], prologue). That means when we visit the past, we don’t want to be an 'ugly tourist.' We want to try to understand people within their own context and their own culture. We want to be patient with what we perceive as their faults. We want to be humble about the limits of our own knowledge. And we want to have a spirit of charity about the past." -Matt Grow, Church historian
"Name one reason I should believe in God said a living, conscious, moral, rational creature inhabiting a life-permitting universe that came into existence from nothing." -Seth Dillion on Instagram
"What matters in what the giver does is what the receiver feels." -Henry B. Eyring
"The Lord loves effort. Effort brings rewards." -Russell M. Nelson
"Good information leads to good inspiration." -Russell M. Nelson
"When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage--a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life." -Clayton Christensen
Joseph smith called language “a little narrow prison” because it is hard to capture a sacred experience or big feelings in language
"Let the Spirit heal our hearts, Thru his quiet, gentle power." -from the hymn Let the Holy Spirit Guide
What sign do I give to the lord with (x) behavior/activity on the sabbath? Am I showing love, respect, sacrifice? -Russell M. Nelson 2015 talk
Turn away from thine own pleasure on sabbath and call it a delight -Isaiah scripture
Like paying tithing—privilege to consecrate 1 of 7 days
“Show me Latter-day Saints who have to feed upon miracles, signs and visions in order to keep them steadfast in the Church, and I will show you members … who are not in good standing before God, and who are walking in slippery paths. It is not by marvelous manifestations unto us that we shall be established in the truth, but it is by humility and faithful obedience to the commandments and laws of God." -President Joseph F. Smith
Thought from a talk on Easter Sunday during our Santa Cruz ward broadcast: Jesus knew he would die, and he gathered friends for a meal the night before, took friends with him to wait at Gethsemane. We should reach out to friends during dark times.
"If we change our perspective so that caring for the poor and needy is less about giving stuff away and more about filling the hunger for human contact and about hearing meaningful conversations and creating rich and positive relationships, then the Lord can send us some place. You yourself are one of the best gifts that you can give to people in need." -Sharon Eubank from byu speeches podcast turning enemies into friends
"Guilt clouds the mind. If you are knowingly sinning, you will subconsciously want to separate yourself from God and find reasons to deny his power." -M. Russell Ballard from BYU speech Questions and Answers
