You will either do so convincingly and well, or you won’t. But at least you will be plugged in to the moment in the process. Not flitting just outside of it, trying to keep everything together like one of those little heel-snapping Sheltie dogs.
You’re supposed to go to a meeting. I mean, as much as you hate them or if they feel stupid or you just don’t want to go. The thing is, if you go to a meeting, you won’t drink that day. It’s like a minibrainwash. It kind of fixes you for a little while.” But then I say, “Of course if I’m really wallowing in self-pity, then I’ll tell myself, ‘Pighead would give anything to feel this uncomfortable right now.’ ” So there’s always the auto–guilt trip method.
But she had wanted it to work so she ignored these things. This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on.
There is always dishonesty at the heart of unhappiness.
To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.
These core certainties are sheltered from your scrutiny. Because you know you can depend on them, you never question them.
When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.
The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycle bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter.
We have no control over anything large in life; only the small details are under our direct management. But even then, we lack any real authority.
There are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored.
While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it. The truth about healing is that you don’t need to heal to be whole.
Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer’s fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons. I.
I read The Old Man and the Sea but my eyelids bled from the toothpicks that I used to keep them open.
Never, ever try to impress somebody. Be exactly the person you would be if you were alone or with somebody it was safe to fart around.
To stop drinking, all you have to do is sit. In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it: They didn’t do it.
I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that’s all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse.
And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I’m going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I’m writing and will have a record of the anxiety.
The best person you can be is the person you are when you are alone on a random Thursday. That’s who you are.
You can see self-pity every day if you live near a playground like I do. Little kids trip or get shoved and they fall over all the time. Usually, they don’t appear to be hurt. They look surprised to see that what was just an instant ago beneath their shoes is now pressed up against their nose. Little kids also know that injuries are an opportunity for extra affection. So whenever you see a little kid take a spill, they’ll look around to verify a nearby adult presence and then they’ll let it rip.
A tear wells in his eye. It wells and then spills down his cheek. And despite being pumped with booze and coke, I can read that one eye as clearly as a billboard for cigarettes. Only instead of saying Alive with Pleasure it says, I Have to Go Now.