Mary Schmich
Mary Schmich
Mary Theresa Schmichis an American journalist who has been a columnist for the Chicago Tribune from 1992, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. She wrote the comic strip Brenda Starr for the last 28 of its 60 years and she wrote the 1997 column, immediately famous, that is usually called "Wear Sunscreen", with the often quoted "Do one thing every day that scares you", frequently misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth29 November 1953
CountryUnited States of America
Mary Schmich quotes about
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.
For some Chicago expats, food is the medicine that blunts the pain of separation.
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.
Advice, like youth, probably wasted on the young
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.
Don't waste time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.
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.
In twenty 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.
Linda Tripp has shown that a true friend is an archivist, a biographer.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Families are ecosystems. Each life grows in response to the lives around it
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.
The soul-sucking activity of TV-watching feels better when it is done with other souls.
Do one thing every day that scares you. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.