Another quite useful and healthy outlet for anger is writing. Even if you “can’t write.” Because actually, if you can speak, you can write. It’s just a period of adjustment using your fingers instead of your mouth. But if you write – or type – exactly what you’re thinking, without even a single change, when you read it, whatever you wrote will sound like you, talking. That’s writing. No MFA required. Especially if what you’re going to write is a letter.
In AA, you are brainwashed into believing that all the good stuff happens only after you stop drinking. Clearly they are lying; my life improved significantly as soon as I ordered a cocktail.
All I know for sure is that I have accidentally fallen through a wormhole in the universe and stumbled into someone else’s grim life.
Was it a universal truth that the closer you looked at something, the more you would see but the less you would understand what you where looking at?
The person who loses their ability to walk will care more about the brownies than about the walking. Because if they have lost the ability to walk, they have accepted the loss. Walking was then, brownies are now. You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies. It only seems like I am kidding.
Regret can power your telescope, changing what you see.
If you fall out of love, remember the love and not the fall.
What you’ve written isn’t a novel. It’s a cry for help.” I.
Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else.
I steered my lips across his jawline and to his mouth. I kissed him. These were open-mouth kisses, young people’s kisses, hungry and full at the same time, in love, at home.
Feeling like you cannot stand one more minute doesn’t mean you can’t. You can, actually. It’s incredibly easy to stop smoking. And it’s horrifically uncomfortable. Then not quite horrifically uncomfortable. Then it’s damn uncomfortable. Then it’s uncomfortable. Then it’s not as uncomfortable as it was at first. Then it’s not so bad. And then you don’t smoke anymore. And you don’t miss it.
When your psychiatrist forgets to look at the clock and is hanging on your every word, that’s when you know, out of all his patients, you are the sickest. He.
Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite.
This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not.
There is a complexity to life that I often overlook. There is a depth of thinking, there is a richness. I am skating on the surface.
Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn’t drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag.
Granted, many of them were indistinguishable blobs in my alcoholic smear of a social life, but I knew how the mind lulled you into a state of perilous complacency when all you had was a personality and a disassociated voice. Meeting.
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. – Jules Renard, 1890.
What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and navels?
When strangers saw him cowering and shivering and skittering, they all assumed he’d had a dramatically abusive past. And by “all,” I mean every single person who saw him. Each one felt the need to make sad faces and say, “Awwww, look at how scared he is. He must be a rescue.” I quickly got to the point where I wanted to say, “Actually, no, he’s a purebred, but I beat him.” Thin.