For Clay Walsh.

You are my sun, my moon, and my stars.

Introduction and illustrations copyright © 2014 by Lisa Congdon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

form without written permission from the publisher.

Page 107 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-2483-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4521-3033-0 (epub2, mobi)

ISBN: 978-1-4521-3226-6 (epub fixed format)

Design by Kristen Hewitt

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

“You can’t wait for inspiration.

You have to go after it with a club.”

—Jack London

I remember it happened on a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon. I tend to lose myself in big, thick, hardbound art books when the weather is dreary, and I was looking through a copy of the American Illustration Annual as I curled up on the sofa. I was marking pages I found pretty or interesting and making notes of illustrators whose work I admired. I noticed that on many of the pages I marked, the artists thoughtfully integrated hand lettering into their illustrations. I realized I was clearly drawn to lettering as an art form (and had been for years), and yet I used it minimally in my own work.

So I came up with an idea. To practice, I’d hand-letter something—a letter of the alphabet, a word, a poem, a song lyric, a quote—every day for a year. I find enormous inspiration in challenging myself to try new things, and this seemed the perfect project to launch a new year. The project would push me to become a more proficient letterer and to develop my own style. I’d publish the results daily on my blog. The project would be called 365 Days of Hand Lettering.

And so it began on January 1. I started with letters of the alphabet, alternating between awkwardly attempting traditional calligraphy with a nib and ink and developing my own styles of lettering with a Micron pen (in the end, the Micron pen won out). In February, I moved from letters of the alphabet to whole words and then phrases. A couple of months into the project, I expanded my repertoire and began lettering quotes by famous people and occasionally poems by some of my favorite poets.

The truth was, I’d been collecting quotes and short poems from some of my favorite writers and thinkers in my handwritten journals for years, but hadn’t until then found a way to bring them to life. I went back and searched for many of the favorite quotes I’d previously collected and then started collecting new ones. I began to keep a running list on the desktop of my computer.

I found that I loved lettering quotes. That may have been because searching for beautiful or inspiring quotes from my artistic and literary heroes broke the monotony of the daily lettering process. It may also have been because my blog readers responded so positively to the quotes—far more so than to anything else I lettered previously in the project. Clearly the quotes that I found inspiring or funny were resonating with other people. I got e-mail after e-mail from blog readers about how different quotes and poems comforted them in times of darkness or reminded them to approach a challenge in a new way. Suddenly 365 Days of Hand Lettering became about more than just my hand lettering. It was also about celebrating the words of writers, thinkers, and artists, and about inspiring others with those words.

The combination proved to be magical for me: Just when I was tiring of the daily lettering practice, I gained renewed motivation to get up every morning and grab my pen. The quotes I selected began to reflect whatever was on my mind on a particular day. When I traveled through Scandinavia in September, the quotes were about adventure. When I felt sad, the quotes I lettered were about mourning or darkness. When I felt inspired, the quotes were about joy and hope. I am a person who wakes up every morning and thinks about the differences I can make each day in the world—through my relationships, my encounters with people, and through my work. So many of the quotes were based on a call to action: how to be a better person. The daily practice of hand lettering became a way for me to express my innermost feelings and aspirations.

This book is a collection of one hundred of my favorite quotes (and a few poems). Most are from my 365 Days of Hand Lettering project, along with several additions. It has been a joy for me to put them together into a book for others to ponder. I hope very much that you find something in this book that inspires you to do something new yourself, introduces you to a new artist or writer, or creates in you a new sense of wonder.

Enjoy!

Quotation Credits

All quotations not listed are in the public domain.

“Love works miracles in stillness.”—Herbert Read. From The Forms of Things Unknown: An Essay on the Impact of the Technological Revolution on the Creative Arts, 1963, used by permission of David Hingham Agency.

“Our battered suitcases were piled up on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”—Jack Kerouac. From On The Road by Jack Kerouac, copyright © 1955 by Jack Kerouac, renewed © 1983 by Stella Kerouac, renewed © 1985 by Stella Kerouac and Jan Kerouac. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group USA, Inc.

“Live to the point of tears.”—Albert Camus. From Albert Camus, Notebooks, used by permission of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

“Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”—Simone de Beauvoir. “Translation”, from Force Of Circumstance by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Richard Howard, translation copyright © 1965 by Richard Howard. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

“That everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”—David Foster Wallace. From Infinite Jest. Used by Permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

“The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.”—Harry Bertoia. Permission granted by Celia Bertoia for Harry Bertoia.

“This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away.”—Anne Lamott. From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 1995, used by permission of author.

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”—Jean Cocteau. Permission granted courtesy Comite Jean Cocteau.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”—Martin Luther King, Jr. Reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor in New York, NY. Copyright © 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. © renewed 1986, Coretta Scott King.

“People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.”—Mignon McLaughlin. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

“I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”—Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2004, 2005 by Island Road, LLC. Published by permission of Augusten Burroughs c/o Selectric Artists LLC.

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”—Stephen King. From Danse Macabre by Stephen King, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. © 1981 by Stephen King. Permission granted by the author and his agent, Darhansoff & Verrill. All rights reserved.

“All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.”—Anaïs Nin. Permission granted by Tree L. Wright, Author’s representative. Copyright the Anaïs Nin Trust. All rights reserved.

“Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins, they require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred.”—Leanne Shapton. From Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, copyright © 2012 by Leanne Shapton. Used by permission of Blue Rider Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”—Maxine Hong Kingston. From The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, copyright © 1975, 1976 by Maxine Hong Kingston. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

“Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Avec l’aimable autorisation de la Succession Antoine de Saint Exupéry-d’Agay.

“And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.”

—Raymond Carver. “Late Fragment” by Raymond Carver, originally published in A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver, currently collected in A New Path to the Waterfall and All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by Raymond Carver, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”—Virginia Woolf. Permission granted: The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”—Henry Miller. From Tropic of Capricorn, 1939. Used by permission of Val Miller.

Words to live by. From Socrates to Lewis Carroll, Marie Curie to Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen to Beatrix Potter: great creative thinkers from every walk of life are gathered here, offering words of wisdom, heartfelt compassion, and stirring calls to action. Lovingly hand-lettered by artist Lisa Congdon, this eclectic anthology will inspire your days for years to come.

Aside from hand-lettering, artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon is best known for her colorful paintings, drawings, and pattern designs. She keeps a daily blog about her life, work, and inspirations called Today is Going to be Awesome. Lisa lives in Oakland, California, with her partner, chihuahua, and two cats. You can see more of her work at www.lisacongdon.com.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Dedication

Copyright

Quotation Credits

About the Author