The January Scrapbook—A Living Document

Last month, I collected a small, um, collection of scraps and quotes that I encountered throughout December and really loved the process; sure, it's not all that different from my Pinterest or saved folder, but there's something special about seeing what resonated outside of the context of a singular work or book review.

What does the line say, extracted? (I think about this a lot, as most agents, friends, critique partners, etc,. who have read my own work would agree I'm a "line-level" writer.) Similarly, if I've read the same book as someone else, I love how we each connect to or annotate different sections or fragments.

So anyway, whether you're familiar with the context of a given work or not, here's a small bundle of quotes that I've adored recently, whether for their sentiment, prose, or some other connection entirely.

Some Fragments I've Loved

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In no particular order. And these don't necessarily indicate what I believe, just scraps that have sparked curiosity, sent me down a reading list, or otherwise piqued my interest. You might find that I drift to certain writers too.

“To feel something deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. — Anne Carson, Red Doc>”

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. — Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

“I was no longer needing to be special, because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses. I was just part of it all. — Ram Dass, Changing Lenses”

“People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”

Honestly, it was only a matter of time before I went for Nietzsche.

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2, 1836-1841 ”

“The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. — Ralph Waldo Emereson”

“Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez-faire for others. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise”

“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind. — Anais Nin, A Spy in the House of Love ”

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings. — Mary Oliver, Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays”

“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot”

“Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing?...Now though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood”

“None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations”

“Nothing can be nobler or more fully human than to perceive that we are fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else. — Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety”

“Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand. It is because of his massive wings that the poet cannot walk. — Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety”

“The best work anyone ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing them. Always. — Arthur Miller”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as understood. — George Orwell, 1984”

“The truth doesn’t set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defense-less and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don’t feel free. I feel like shit. — Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca”

“Why do I feel like something's missing in my life without them and they don't feel the same about me? That doesn't make them bad, does it? — Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca.”

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. — Rainer Maria Rilke”

“This ideal figure seemed, from the way the Stoic lecturers talked, to have somehow become perfect in some sudden transformation long ago; gradual self-improvement was hardly discussed. — Letters from a Stoic”

“It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse”

“Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.”

“The fact is, it is easier to discard than it is to amass. In part this is because discarding is negative, not generative. It operates, by definition, upon that which already exists. When Immanuel Kant—who else!—insisted that a judgment of taste must be 'disinterested,' what I think he meant was that as long as we want something from an object, we remain incapable of judging it aesthetically—of valuing it in its own right and on its own terms. — Becca Rothfield, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess”