It is not what happens to you that matters, but how you react to it that matters.

Epictetus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Victor Frankl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.

John F. Kennedy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy

The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.

Ann Patchett

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Patchett

If there is nowadays a backlash against fiction for not dealing with “the real world”, such poppycock, then I deduce it’s a backlash against imagination, which puts before the mind what was not there before. If we ever lose our awe before this complex emanation from the personality, then we will indeed be ready for the machine age, the hegemony of incessant data and dumbed-down reading.

Paul West

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_West_(writer)

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

Marc Chagall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall

Fast is fine but accuracy is final. You must learn to be slow in a hurry.

Wyatt Earp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyatt_Earp

You can’t test courage cautiously.

Annie Dillard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dillard

Life is a racket. Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.

Nick Tosches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Tosches

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike