Quote of the Day (Annie Sullivan, on Beginning and Failing)

“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose— not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.”— Irish-American teacher of the blind Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), quoted by student Helen Keller in Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955)

Quote of the Day (Roger Rosenblatt, on Resolutions for Improving the World)

“What if, instead of planning our exercise regimens, we focused our intentions on all that is undesirable in human activity — wars, bigotry, brutality, the despoiling of the earth — and sought to address it? What if instead of making a milquetoast resolution, we made airtight commitments?...

“The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth.”—Essayist Roger Rosenblatt, “Resolve About Something Bigger Than Yourself,” The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2023

Quote of the Day (Poet Norman Nicholson, As a New Year—and Winter—Kicks In)

“The stars wheel past the windows
Like flocks of winter sparrows;
The bell clangs out the hours,
And frost sparkles like stars.”—English poet Norman Nicholson (1914-1987), “For the New Year,” in Five Rivers (1945)

I heard these and the remaining verses from this poem recited on a BBC Radio classical music show yesterday morning. I fell in love with the beautiful imagery, and thought that, before the first week of the new year ended, there was still time to celebrate the time of the year it’s evoking.

I took the photo accompanying this post in Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, just before Christmas 2020.

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on a New Year’s Resolution for World Leaders)

“On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.”—American war correspondent, novelist and travel writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), The Face of War (1959)

Joke of the Day (Mark Twain, on What Needs Most Reforming)

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.” ― American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)

W.H. Auden, With Wise Advice for the New Year

“Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there

May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings their release.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter” (1940)

“New Year Letter” is far longer than my favorite W.H. Auden poem, “In Memory of W.B.Yeats.” But if it didn’t have that elegy's concentrated power, it issued an equally ringing summons to the best human impulses toward tolerance and hope only a few months into a second world war that had arisen from the most hideous brutality the world had ever known, as I think you'll see in the above lines.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ With a Very Different New Year’s Resolution)

Lorelai Gilmore (played by Lauren Graham): “Hey, I have a new year's resolution for you: Become more cynical and self-absorbed.”

Rory Gilmore (played by Alexis Bledel): “I'll work on it.”— Gilmore Girls, Season 2, Episode 10, “The Bracebridge Dinner,” original air date Dec. 11, 2001, teleplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, directed by Chris Long

This is for a friend—and he knows who he is!!!!—who loves both “Gilmore Girls.”

Quote of the Day (Lord Tennyson, on the Need to ‘Ring Out the Darkness of the Land’)

“Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.”— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” from In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)

The picture accompanying this post depicts the Miller Tower Carillon, a fixture of the Chautauqua Institution, where I have frequently spent my summer vacation. I took this particular photograph back in 2011.

Quote of the Day (Alfred Lord Tennyson, on the ‘Threshold of the Year To Come’)

“Friends,

I am only merry for an hour or two

Upon a birthday: if this life of ours

Be a good glad thing, why should we make us merry

Because a year of it is gone? but Hope

Smiles from the threshold of the year to come

Whispering 'It will be happier.'” — Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Foresters, Robin Hood and Maid Marian (1892)

A day in 2014 is already gone, but these verses were too good not to use. Happy New Year, again, friends!