Quotations | Joanne Guidoccio

Whenever I look out at Nature’s breathtaking fall palette, I am inspired and invigorated to start anew. Anything and everything is possible during the cool, crisp days of autumn.

Some of my favorite quotations…

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. George Eliot

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face. John Donne

Autumn, the year’s last loveliest smile. William Cullen Bryant

Autumn, the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. Samuel Butler

Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn. Emily Dickinson

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting, and autumn a mosaic of them all. Stanley Horowitz

Autumn asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping. But it also asks that we learn to let go—to acknowledge the beauty of sparseness. Bonaro W. Overstreet

I’ve never known anyone yet who doesn’t suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around…We’re all eight years old and anything is possible. Sue Grafton

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. Albert Camus

Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn. Elizabeth Lawrence

Collecting quotations has been one of my lifelong hobbies. In the pre-computer days, I would jot down quotations on slips of paper and toss them in a desk drawer. Once a month, I would type them up and place them in a special file folder. I’ve kept the folder, but now use Pinterest and Goodreads to store my favorite quotations.

Some of my all-time favorites from four extraordinary women…

MARY OLIVER

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Listen—are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth, the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.

MAYA ANGELOU

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

When you know better, you do better.

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

ANNA QUINDLEN

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination and the journey. They are the home.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.

The life you have led doesn’t need to be the life you have.

NORA EPHRON

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.