Quotes from Mary Schmich

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

Barbie is just a doll.

Every day each of us wakes up, reaches into drawers and closets, pulls out a costume for the day and proceeds to dress in a style that can only be called preposterous.

The first gay person I ever met was surely not the first gay person I ever met.

Here's a thing about the death of your mother, or anyone else you love: You can't anticipate how you'll feel afterward. People will tell you; a few may be close to right, none exactly right.

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

You can map your life through your favorite movies, and no two people's maps will be the same.

You can figure out who you were by which movies you loved when.

Opening day. All you have to do is say the words and you feel the shutters thrown wide, the room air out, the light pour in. In baseball, no other day is so pure with possibility. No scores yet, no losses, no blame or disappointment. No hangover, at least until the game's over.

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.

Replace the words "have to" with "get to" and watch how the cold rain on your life changes to sunshine.

Thanksgiving without tension is like a Thanksgiving without turkey. It can be done, but it is not the norm.

Don't waste your time on jealousy.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

The secret to happiness, at Thanksgiving or any time, is to find pleasure in imperfection.

On an average day, we allow ourselves the fiction that we own a piece of our workplace. That's part of what it takes to get the job done. Deeper down, we know it's all on loan.

The secret to happiness, at Thanksgiving or any time, is to reframe obligation as opportunity. You don't have to spend Thanksgiving with your family. You get to.

The movies we love and admire are to some extent a function of who we are when we see them.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

In twenty years you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.

One thing you might want to learn before you attend the world's largest ukulele lesson is how to say ukulele.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, don't put up with those who are reckless with yours.

Linda Tripp has shown that a true friend is an archivist, a biographer.