Saying just the right thing after a considerable, awkward pause is far less effective than saying the wrong thing with perfect timing. I’m telling you.
Childhood is what ended me up in the hospital and teetering on the edge of deathly alcoholism. It was really good for me to accept it. To accept all the embarrassment and the shame so I don’t feel like I used to.
When you say, “I need more confidence,” what you’re really saying is, “I need those people over there to approve of me.” That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.
There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that’s life or a scene in a novel. What’s interesting to people, whether it’s memoir or fiction, is the truth.
And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn’t have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.
I sit there and think how it isn’t fair that I can’t drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.
Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.
The more obsessed one is with getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.
Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles.
Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they’re thinking.
Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.
The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.
My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone’s face while wearing goosedown mittens.
I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.
After was better. Before was only there so After could happen.
All children should be loved, protected, nurtured – emotionally and intellectually – respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.
Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that’s the case, screw everybody else. You’re not a bottle of Valium.
I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it.
Any damage that’s been done, you have to fix yourself because it needs fixing and there is nobody else to do the work. Blame may well be justified, but it’s not going to move you forward in your life.
So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography – and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.