By January 4th, you may have already broken some of the promises you made to yourself when the champagne was flowing last week. And why shouldn’t you? Willpower is bound to be in short supply after spending the entire holiday season gorging on addictive substances such as sugar, alcohol, and wifi.
Whether your goal is to be healthier, more creative, or luckier in love, certain authors have a way of putting things that ought to help things along — for another week at least, after which you’ll hopefully be jotting down your own inspirational thoughts in one of the myriad blank books your relatives keep giving you for Christmas.
1. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1775
“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
2. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847
“It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.”
3. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 1965
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
4. Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, 1993
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
5. Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, 1995
“Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job…And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another–that is surely the basic instinct…Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.”
6. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1996
“I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts.”
7. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000
“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”
8. Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, 2012
“It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.
The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.”
9. Dave Eggers, The Circle, 2013
“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”
