March 1

“I have no conscience at all—least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.” —Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories “I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”

March 3

“I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I’ll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you’ll ever hear. Ever.” —Patricia MacLachlan, Word After Word After Word

March 5

“To spend one’s life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I’m not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?”

March 6

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

March 7

“One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”

March 15

“If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?” —Augusta Gregory

March 16

“It doesn’t matter what people tell you. It doesn’t matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you’re headed in the exact right direction.” —Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

March 18

“Poets find their voices when they articulate the wishes of the dead, especially those slain as sacrificial talismans to a larger frame of existence.” —Michael S. Harper

March 19

“You’re born cute. Babies are cute. Not hard to guess why—it’s so everyone will forgive them for being such a pain. You grow a little older, and people say, what beautiful hair, or get a load of those baby blues, or something nice that keeps you thinking you’re still on the cuteness track. Then you hit twelve or thirteen and boom, they tell you everything needs fixing.” —Peter Abrahams, Down the Rabbit Hole

March 23

“Love? Love? Love is not safe, my lady silk, love is dangerous. It is deceitfully sweet like wine from a fresh palm tree at dawn. Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need to count on human strength, and when we have to count pennies for food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.” —Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes: A Love Story