Do you surf like Agatha Christie? Or run on the beach with your dog like Kurt Vonnegut? However you celebrate the summer days, I hope you are having fun!

George Bernard Shaw:

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” (quotation also attributed to Benjamin Franklin and others)

via surfingheritage.org

Jack London:

“Go strip off your clothes that are a nuisance in this mellow clime. Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you, hit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should.” (from his memoir The Cruise of the Snark)

Agatha Christie:

“Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.” (from her memoir The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery)

via the guardian.com

Kurt Vonnegut (with his Lhasa Apso, Pumpkin)    

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” ( from “Knowing What’s Nice,” an essay from In These Times)

Photography by his wife, Jill Krementz via nytimes.com

Joan Didion:

‘I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.’
(from the Commencement address at the University of California, Riverside, 1975)

photo by her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne for Vogue