Quotes from Maira Kalman

The ability to take a walk from one point to the next point, that is half the battle won.

He is a monk. On his card it says INNER PEACE CENTER. I will go there in February for a tea ceremony. Does he actually know more than I do about inner peace? If he met my relatives, would he have a nervous breakdown? What about his relatives? Do they drive him nuts? The truth is everybody gets on everybody's nerves.

All terrific but the people. THE PEOPLE. Everyone looks so exalted, or so wretched, or so spiffy, so funny, so splendid. If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour.

I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It's not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It's about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It's about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged.

Useless and precious objects. Taking up space. Taking up time.

Some people, surely, die on the way to something. Then we call them the late so-and-so.

I don't want to trudge up insane mountains or through war-torn lands. Just a nice stroll through the hill and dale. But now I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see in a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.

The pieces I chose were based on one thing only — a gasp of delight. Isn't that the only way to curate a life?

Go out and walk. That is the glory of life.

I want to say that wonderful ideas can come from anywhere. Sometimes you make a mistake, or break something, or lose a hat, and the next thing you know, you get a great idea.

I read obituaries first thing in the morning. With a cup of coffee. This is NOT MORBID. Just epic. Maybe it's a way of trying to figure out, before the day begins, what is important. And I am curious about all the little things that make up life. Little?

There is no reason to save tickets and stubs. They are tiny and inconsequential. But I do save them and remember that number twenty-three was from the coat check at the restaurant where I ate the lemon tart. The number is so elegant and honest. And the lemon tart was so good.

And it is very true that the most tender, complicated, most generous part of our being blossoms without any effort, when it comes to the love of a dog.

Jump right in, or wade in slowly. Advantage to one, it's over quickly. Advantage to the other, it isn't.

Oh, Tocqueville, you're the man.

I like Thomas Jefferson, though he intimidated me. I thought he would have been very tough to be around. I don't know if he had such a sense of humor.

My mother was the influence on me - my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.

I have been working for over 30 years and am always wondering about where I am and where I am going. It does not stop and become a fixed event of achievement.

It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

It's almost impossible to reconcile the realities of how one feels during the day, hour by hour. But I approach things not cynically.

On my desk, I always have a lemon or a lime drying. I love the fragrance. Also, a Staedtler eraser, a brush for the eraser and a pencil sharpener.

If I could never work again and I could just listen to music and walk, I'd be very, very happy.

I still do have the little lunch bag that my mother made out of a towel and embroidered with my name on it for when I went to kindergarten.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.