A Note to My Fellow Oldsters: As someone who has done standing yoga for about thirty years, off and on, I have assiduously avoided chair yoga, thinking it a rinky-dink haven for the stiff and lazy. Yesterday, I popped onto a chair for 45 minutes of yoga poses and learned a lesson...

“I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

"Look at everything. Don’t close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see." ~ John Cage

"Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. ... Oh my God, it’s breathing, you realize. Maybe it’s even thinking. What in hell’s name do I do next?" ~ Stephen King / @stephenking.bsky.social

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." ~ Robert Hughes

"Memoirs are history. They are ethnological evidence. They are us. And frankly, we matter. Each of us." ~ Cat Pleska

"Write, just write. Write what you remember, what's happening now, what you predict will happen. Write in any form: fiction, nonfiction, autofiction, poetry, drama, screenplay, memoir, journal, scraps and aphorisms. Publish or not. Somebody has to keep culture alive." ~ @janetburroway.bsky.social

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. —John Muir

"Another writer once asked me, 'Don’t you hate it when people tell you they got your book from the library instead of buying it?' I had to voice an emphatic NO. I’ve had a library card since I was eight." ~ Beth Ann Fennelly

"All is inspiration – twigs, people, clouds, shapes, names, words, sounds, colors and forms." ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"It is worth mentioning... that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time...Doubts creep in .... Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything." ~ Virginia Woolf

"Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one." ~ M.F.K. Fisher

"Write like you write, like you can’t help but write, and your voice will become yours and yours alone. It’ll take time but it’ll happen as long as you let it." ~ Chuck Wendig // @chuckwendig.bsky.social

"The only way to override your 'limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude' is to produce." ~ Cheryl Strayed / @cherylstrayed.bsky.social

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." ~ E.L. Doctorow

"Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is." ~ Nadine Gordimer

"Until I was about seven, I thought books were just there, like trees. When I learned that people actually wrote them, I wanted to, too, because all children aspire to inhuman feats like flying." ~ Fran Lebowitz

"I feel that when you look out into the world, the world is funny. And people are funny. And that people always try to make each other laugh.... If you’re going to ignore that, what are you doing?" ~ Lorrie Moore

"Don't use AI to write. Use childhood trauma like a real writer." ~ Some Clever Person on the Internet

"Writing is my way of paying attention—of insisting that this business of living and dying (and everything that happens between) actually matters." ~ Dinah Lenney / @dinahlenney.bsky.social

"Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught." ~ Ai Weiwei

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." ~ Robert Frost

“It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready.There's almost no such thing as ready. There's only now." ~ Hugh Laurie

"Start writing. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but START WRITING. There is NO SUCH THING as 'too late' in the arts. Trust me. START." ~ Patton Oswalt

"I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." ~ Georgia O’Keeffe

"Learning to write ... is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest." ~ Bret Lott

“Writing is only one word at a time. Various things can present themselves, but when you face the page, it’s a couple of words, and then a couple more words, and, if you’re lucky, a sentence or a paragraph." ~ Jane Smiley

"they ask me to remember/ but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep on remembering / mine." ~ Lucille Clifton

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~ Anaïs Nin