21 Thought-Provoking Quotes to Accompany Us into the New Year

Those who know me know that I enjoy pithy or insightful quotes. As Voltaire once observed, “A good quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit.” Samuel Johnson adds this qualifier: “A quotation is useful in proportion to its truth.”

Good quotes work because they compress insight, lending borrowed clarity to thoughts we haven’t yet shaped cleanly ourselves. I keep a file of favorite quotes so I'm able to revisit them from time to time. Also, they can be useful as intros to stories, articles, essays and blog posts. They are frequently handy.

Here are 19 quotes for pondering as we reflect on the past year and prepare for the year ahead.

"These are the times that try men's souls."
—Thomas Paine

“War does not determine who is right—only who is left.”
— Bertrand Russell

"Optimism is the opium of the people."

—Milan Kundera

"That we live in strange times has, I believe, been established beyond the shadow of a doubt."
—Irina Slav

“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious,
 it seems, takes longer.”
—Edward R. Murrow

"I learned to have pleasure in reading simply because I love stories."
—Abdulrazak Gurnah

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

 -– Helen Keller.

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”

—Peter Handke

“Nothing great, nothing of value and nothing that will last
can be got without effort.”
—Andre Gide

"If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal."
— Joni Mitchell

“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
-– John Wooden

"What we anticipate seldom occurs;
what we least expected generally happens."

--Benjamin Disraeli

"Read and meditate upon the wars of the great captains. This is the only means of learning the art of war."

—Napoleon Bonaparte

"What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it."

--Gabriel García Márquez

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."
—Gustave Le Bon

"The more the state interferes in the life of a nation, the less free the people will be."
—Friedrich Hayek

Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

—Graham Greene

“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
-– Robert Louis Stevenson

"Sincerity is not truth. Being earnest
does not necessarily make one right."
--E. Newman

Table Scraps: Primarily for Writers

If you're a writer you are probably like me. You enjoy reading what other writers say about writing. One of the writers in this list once wrote, or said, that he takes more pride in how many books he's read than how many he has written.

If you're not a writer, I'm certain that many of these table scraps will speak to you in some way or another anyway. Take your time. Relax. Chew slowly. Enjoy the flavor of the ideas as well as the words. 

* * * * 

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
--Elmore Leonard

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero. A bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. "
--Walter Pater

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
--Washington Irving

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
--Jorge Luis Borges

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."
--Italo Calvino

"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
--E.L. Doctorow

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
--David Foster Wallace

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
--Carlos Fuentes

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
--Carlos Fuentes

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me."
--Raymond Carver

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
--John Gardner

And One Last Quote
"A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing."
--Don Roff

Blues Cruise and Other News

Omelette containing Tiki brat, mushrooms and onion, accompanied by
grape tomatoes, pickled carrot slices and whole grain toast.

The top story in our local Sunday paper is about a couple from our region who went on a cruise a couple days before all the borders were slammed shut. It was a holiday at sea that turned out to be no picnic. Story here. If you are able to open it, my apologies.

It brings to mind the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story Love in Time of Cholera. It's a love story about in which two young people's initial infatuation does not unfold the way our young hero anticipates or desires. Thus, Florentino must wait a lifetime to possess the object of his desire, because Fermina Daza has married a doctor and lost interest in the waves of time that have receded behind her.

The title of the book [SPOILER ALERT] comes from the climax in which the two are finally united aboard a sailing vessel displaying the warning flag indicating contagion on board. They decide to share their love in this floating paradise for ever.

My interest in Marquez stemmed from having seen his name on a list of authors influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, whose magical realism influenced a host of authors including Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Italo Calvino an myself.  A Colombian author of both fiction and non-fiction works, Marquez received a Nobel Prize "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."

Another of his best known works is 100 Years of Solitude, a multigenerational novel on the order of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

In addition to novels, Marquez also wrote short stories and non-fiction works. Because of his significance, I acquired and read his News of a Kidnapping, a journalistic recounting of the kidnapping, imprisonment, and eventual release of a handful of prominent figures in Colombia in the early 1990s. (Picture Dan Rather or Ted Koppel being kidnapped.) My interest, in part, was peaked by the mysteries surrounding Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel. I found it a compelling read at the time, bringing to mind a number of other stories, and the Johnny Depp film Blow.

* * * *
In other news.... from the FWIW Dept.

WHO Deletes Misleading Tweet That Spread Paranoia About COVID-19 Reinfection

Michigan Gov. Rolls Back Some of State's More Insane Coronavirus Restrictions

The Lamp of Liberty

Keep in mind that worrying diminishes the strength of our immune systems. Gratitude strengthens it. Relax. And have a safe week.