The July Scrapbook—A Living Document
Quotes I've encountered in July that I'm loving—continually updated and curated.
By Grace Smith
Published July 4, 2025
I'm not sure why this year's been a blink (maybe because I no longer spend every day primarily in a manuscript-induced deep flow state), but somehow it's already July.
In June, I read 15 books, ranging from quick hit BookTok romances to nitty-gritty philosophers (even more angsty and simmering than the former.) Childhood rereads, even an audiobook or two. There's something in the lakewater that turns my family and I into gluttonously literary monsters.
A text from a sister yesterday.
Between books I've read this year and books I haven't, I've read plenty of quotes that I've absolutely loved. Some striking lines, or ones I've been thinking about:
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“When all is said and done, you never speak about yourself without loss: condemn yourself and you are always believed; praise yourself and you never are. — Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship.”
“Indeed, in a certain sense all present actions are stupid, for the highest degree of human intelligence which can now be attained will certainly be exceeded in the future... — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.”
“Heaven is on earth—is the Earth—and rapture is the sensible response wherever a clear line of sight remains. — Edward Hoagland, Travels in Alaska.”
“The dream doesn't rescue the maiden. — Louise Glück, Siren.”
“I like to have space to spread my mind out in. — Virginia Woolf, diaries.”
“Nearly all of our faults are more forgivable than the means we use to hide them. — François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims.”
“You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time. — Emily Wilson, introduction to The Iliad.”
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle.”
“I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say. — Albert Camus, The Fall.”
“This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes...It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. — Mary Oliver, Devotions.”
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. — Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things. — Figuring, Maria Popova.”
“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people. Maybe that means—hell, it’s complicated. — John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent.”
“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there—that is living. — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. ”
“People are naturally sceptical; no one really believes in change until they've had a solid experience of it. — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince.”
“The more I study a thing the more I get it backards. Study long and ye study wrong. That’s what a old rifleshooter told me oncet beat me out of half a beef in a rifleshoot. I know things I ain’t never studied. I know things I ain’t never even thought of. — Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark.”
“Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it. — John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent.”
“A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all that nature requires of them. But sometimes in a man or a woman an awareness takes place--not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. — John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters.”
“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don't think it's a privilege or an indulgence, it's not even a quest. I think it's almost like knowledge, which is to say, it's what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case. — Toni Morrison.”
