So... This is my life

37/100 days of productivity + TUE 07.12.16 // 1:41 pm

theme of the day: Practice, practice, practice! ▰˘◡˘▰  took a practice test this morning before starting any review, just to sort of gauge where im at! This preliminary score was pretty ok but my goal is to try to improve at least 1 point a day after reviewing every day! 

Hi friends! I’m back with another quote masterpost. As an aspiring author, fellow writers never cease to amaze me with their wisdom, with their humbleness, but most importantly, with their words. These quotes aren’t necessarily motivational, but nevertheless, I had a great time researching the authors and their quotes. Though I did as much research as I saw necessary, everyone makes mistakes, so if you think one of the quotes in this post belong to another person, be sure to let me know! I made this with bullet journals in mind, but do with these quotes what you wish. I hope you enjoy, and all of you have a great day!

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, some are strong at the broken places.”

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“Courage is grace under pressure.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

“Every day above earth is a good day.”

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

“Time is the least thing we have of.”

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.”

MARK TWAIN

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

“‘Classic’ - a book which people praise and don’t read.”

“Never put off ‘til tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

MAYA ANGELOU

“We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

“Nothing will work unless you do.”

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

“If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love.”

“In diversity, there is beauty and there is strength.”

VIRGINIA WOOLF

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

“I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge.”

“Not all those who wander are lost.”

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”

“It’s a dangerous business going out your front door.”

“Courage is found in unlikely places.”

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”

“Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.”

“Little by little, one travels far.”

“There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”

OSCAR WILDE

“I can resist everything except temptation.”

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

“Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”

“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”

ANAÏS NIN

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

“Dreams are necessary to life.”

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”

LEWIS CARROLL

“Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.”

“I can’t go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then.”

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

“One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”

“I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.”

“It is better to be feared than loved.”

“Oh, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round.”

“I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”

“We’re all mad here.”

JAMES BALDWIN

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to be respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”

ALICE WALKER

“The nature of this flower is to bloom.”

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.”

“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”

“Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.”

“I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.”

“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.”

“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.”

“Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”

“Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.”

CHARLES DICKENS

“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.”

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.”

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

“Reflect upon your present blessings – of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”

“A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”

“The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.”

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”

“Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.”

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”

“Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

1. Take a clipboard to school. You have to be prepared to do homework ANYWHERE at ANYTIME. Carry it in your hand with some paper and your homework clipped onto it and get work done whenever you can. Don’t keep the clipboard in your bag.

2. USE YOUR PLANNER EVERY DAY. Keeping track of assignments and important dates helps clear your mind. You don’t have to worry about remembering everything because all of it is written down. If you have a lot going on at once, start a bullet journal. If you can, divide your planner into sections based on different activities. For example, my bullet journal has 4 major sections: school work, extracurricular activities, community service, and general life issues. This creates order in the midst of chaos and also enforces the idea of taking everything one thing at a time. Your planner shouldn’t overwhelm you.

3. Get the biggest calendar you can find and hang it on the wall. The purpose of the calendar is to allow you to establish a general time frame for everything you need to do. PLAN AHEAD. Make sure EVERYTHING is on that calendar. Being overwhelmed by your planner is bad because it leads to a stressful day; your calendar takes on the role of allowing you to see the big picture. Having everything written down on a calendar creates a sense of urgency that’ll decrease the likelihood or duration of procrastination.

4. If you’re taking multiple AP classes, dedicate at least one day of the week to each subject. I had 7 AP’s so I studied a different subject each day. For example, every Monday was Macroeconomics day. I took my econ review book to school on Mondays and studied whenever I had some extra time. Start doing this 3 or 4 months before the exams in May to avoid cramming and excessive stress.

5. Sleep whenever you can but avoid sleeping on the way home from school. If you enter your home feeling sleepy the bed is going to be extra enticing.

6. If you NEED to pull an all-nighter (try to avoid them), drink a cup of straight up black coffee (no sugar) and take a 20 minute nap. It takes some time for the caffeine to kick in so you might as well get some sleep. You’ll eventually get used to the bitterness.

7. Sometimes you need to skip school but don’t skip unless you absolutely have to. If you do, you better not sleep in! Wake up normally and get to work ASAP. Do the makeup work and turn it in the next day, even if you don’t have to.

8. Study smarter, not harder. Figure out which study methods work for you. Note-taking is time-consuming so try to find alternatives. You don’t have to make everything aesthetically pleasing to post it on tumblr. In fact, if you’re compelled to take pretty notes just to post it on tumblr, LEAVE NOW. DO NOT WASTE TIME.

9. Do homework for the learning experience instead of the grade. Don’t copy work from your friends. If you use homework as a study resource, you won’t have to worry about long review sessions before a test. I have never studied for a Spanish test but the lowest score I’ve ever gotten on one is a 93. How? I did my homework.  

10. STOP TRYING TO BE PERFECT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. Perfection = waste of time. Don’t spend 10 hours writing an essay if you know you can get the same grade by only spending 2. I used to believe that the most important thing was being proud of everything you put your name on but none of that matters when you haven’t slept in 48 hours.

11. Complete the difficult tasks first. One of the many reasons people procrastinate is to avoid difficult tasks. If you save the hardest assignment for last, you’re more vulnerable to wasting time.

12. This one is very bad because it involves lying but it saved my grade a couple of times: ALWAYS turn in your homework. Why? Rarely missing an assignment gives you a good reputation and teachers tend to trust hardworking students. If you ever forget to do an assignment and you’re known to be a good student, your teacher is more likely to believe your excuse. Or, if you really left it at home, he/she/they might give you an extra day.

13. GOOGLE DRIVE IS YOUR BEST FRIEND. Can’t turn in your essay because you told yourself you’d print it in the morning and forgot? No worries! It’s in google drive! Need a past assignment for reference but have the copy at home? No worries! It’s in google drive!

14. Your study space significantly impacts productivity. Organize your room/space to maximize concentration/productivity.

I know it’s so hard to get back into routine, so here’s some back-to-school motivation for ya. Swearing always seems to make its way into my blog 😂 guess that says a lot about me. (Also the bottom right corner is my bio if you haven’t noticed)