Just thought I'd share some New Year's quotes (in alphabetical order by first name). Hope you all have a safe and Happy New Year, and see you in 2010. This year's gonna be good!! With the quotes, feel free to comment and add your own:

• "An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." ~Bill Vaughan

• "We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day." ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce*

• "We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential." ~Ellen Goodman

• "New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights." ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

• "I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you? Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second." ~Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

• "One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things." ~John Burroughs

• "New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual." ~Mark Twain

• "Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right." ~Oprah Winfrey

• "The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to." ~P.J. O'Rourke

• "The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears." ~W.H. Auden

*So as you can tell, I provided links to Wikipedia's entries on the people quoted (just in case someone reading wasn't familiar with a name...I know I wasn't, with some of the quotes I found), but I couldn't immediately find anything with regards to Edith Lovejoy Pierce. Not even a Wikipedia entry, I know!!

And as a side note, as a result of some of the classes in AU's Arts Management program (particularly Art, Community & Diversity), I couldn't even begin to think of selecting quotes I particularly liked without considering how the choices might or might not be diverse, whether it be by sex, culture, race, content, mere length, or even the professions and fields of those quoted; on a more fundamental level I wondered what having diverse quotes would even mean. I also started thinking of how, as an Arts Administrator, even in this context and with literature, I could use it as a chance to inform (hence the Wikipedia links, for the curious).

Maybe this is why I stick to dancing when I go out (and not speaking)...most of the things I think about and over-analyze don't make for great conversation :-)