Mary Schmich Quotes

Don't waste your time on jealousy ...

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

Advice is a form of Nostalgia

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 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. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

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

Do not read beauty magazines. They only make you feel ugly.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia.

Families are ecosystems. Each life grows in response to the lives around it

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

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.

Barbie is just a doll.

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.

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

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

'The Hunger Games' isn't for everybody. But neither is 'Anna Karenina.'

The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.

Like many women my age, I am 28 years old.

TV happens. And once it's happened, it's gone. When it's gone, you move on, no tears, no tantrums, no videotape.

Don't waste your time worrying about the future, it might never come.

For some Chicago expats, food is the medicine that blunts the pain of separation.

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.

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.

Chicago is constantly auditioning for the world, determined that one day, on the streets of Barcelona, in Berlin's cabarets, in the coffee shops of Istanbul, people will know and love us in our multidimensional glory, dream of us the way they dream of San Francisco and New York.

Worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.

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.

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

Don't waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.