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"Never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool."

Richard Feynman

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"I like keeping a diary because it’s like saving receipts. You know where you’ve been and what it cost. You become aware of patterns. Less rattled. This time of year isn’t even a month into winter. It’s often a bleak stretch in a long, long month. Hang in."

Austin Kleon

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Stories reveal our being part of a living fabric, the intertwining threads that connect us to one another. Pope Francis

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“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.”

- Ian McEwan

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"We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet."

Anne Enright

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We never thought my mother would get dementia—never. She had heart issues, so we thought that’s what she’d need to manage; dementia was totally out of left field. The lesson is that old age is coming and it’s rarely what you expect, so just set yourself up to age well as much as you can. - Sarah Fay

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"Using DNA provided by Pranger and other family members, the remains of Allen Lee Livingston—missing since 1993—finally came home. “When I went and talked with Allen’s mother to let her know that we have identified her son’s remains, I noticed on an end table next to the couch a landline telephone. I said, ‘You don’t see that very often anymore,’” Jellison says.

“And she said, ‘Well, it’s the only number Allen has to call me at.’ So for 30 years she’d been sitting beside that phone waiting for her son to call. That’s the closure I’m talking about."

Unburying The Truth, Indianapolis Monthly Dec 2024

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"True evolution isn’t about leaving your old self behind, it’s about deepening into — and remembering — the remarkable human that you already are. It’s about remembering all of the skills and knowledge and power that have always been with you. That you were encoded with when you came in, that you have inherited from your ancestors, that you have cultivated through all of your completely unique life experiences."

- Jocelyn K Glei

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The older I get, the more I realize that one can only truly live with those who set you free, who love you with an affection as light to bear as it is deep to feel.

Life today is too harsh, too bitter, too draining to endure additional constraints from those we love. That is how I am your friend: I cherish your happiness, your freedom, your adventure—in a word—and I wish to be the companion you can always rely on.

~Albert Camus

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“You never know when ideas are going to hit you. You can get ideas just from sitting in a room daydreaming, just feeling the air. I think people are like radios. They pick up signals”

David Lynch

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“Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.”

Marc Riboud

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“It is a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice you will improve at.”

Elizabeth Gilbert

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“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

- Flannery O'Connor

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Two simple rules:You get better at what you practice. Everything is practice. Look around and you may be surprised by what people are “practicing" each day. If you consider each moment a repetition, what are most people training for all day long? James Clear

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I realized that I’m about to be 59. And holy shit. In a year, I’m going to be 60. And for some reason, for me, figuring I’m probably not going to live past 90, next year is the beginning of my last act, first 30 years, second, 30 years, last 30 years. And you know, you’re an actor, you know how important third acts are, they can make sense out of the first two, right? They’re very important. It’s kind of a legacy that you’re going to leave behind. And so I thought, I have no idea what I want to do with my third act. And then it hit me, I know what I don’t want to have happen. I know that I don’t want to die with regrets when it’s too late to do anything about it. So one thing that I want to do and my third act is make sure that when I do die, I’ve cleaned up everything. I mean, you always have some regrets, but it’s not going to like make me feel bad when I die. And then the other thing is, you can’t really know how to go forward, if you don’t know where you’ve been. Yeah, so I spent the year between 59 and 60, researching myself, very objectively, like, it wasn’t really me, it was somebody else. And what I discovered was that I’m really brave. I didn’t know that before. I’ve been brave all my life. And that made me feel it gave me a lot of confidence. I was a much more confident person at the end than I was when I started this research. So anybody that’s approaching 60, think about doing what I discovered later, it’s a thing it’s called a life review. psychologists, psychiatrists gerontologist, encourage older people to do this, especially older people who are depressed, because one of the things that happens is that you discover, you know, a lot of who we are and how we behave. And everything is because of how we were parented, or not parented. And we always because that’s what kids do, we always assume that whatever happened, it was our fault. And what I discovered and what people do discover when they do a life review was Guess what? It had nothing to do with you.

Jane Fonda

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"Somebody said our 60s are the youth of our old age, and I like that feeling of starting another phase, and trying to go into it with more perspective and also way more gratitude."

Amy Rigby

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"With any question of justice, the big picture can feel overwhelming. At those times, I have almost always found it helpful to zoom in, to focus on the same problem at a smaller, more manageable scale. I may not be able to save the zebras and the leopards, but I can help save the zebra swallowtail butterflies and the giant leopard moths. I can do that, at least in my own small yard, by nurturing the host plants they need to reproduce. Making a discernible, measurable difference to my wild neighbors is an act of resistance, too."

Margaret Renkl