Looking for some words to guide revelers into the future? Here are some sentiments from writers who have pondered the unknown.
1. Looking for Alaska by John Green
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia…You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
2. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
3. The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir
Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
5. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
“The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. ”
(Bonus, because I love this book so much)
“Look, I’m going to find a way to be happy, and I’d really love to be happy with you, but if I can’t be happy with you, then I’ll find a way to be happy without you.”
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
“Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. . . . With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.”
7. Tik-Tok by John Sladek
The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
8. The Theban Plays by Sophocles
Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.
9. Stephen Wright, Comedian
I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.
10. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
