Imagine there is no God. There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only your son and his son and his son, and the world you leave for them.
Flattery is addictive. Convince others they are special. Assure them they have talent. Make yourself the source of people’s self worth. Doing so binds them to you and it preempts them from developing their skills and proving their true potential.
The measure of a man is not what he does for wages but what he does with his free time.
The first week I was here, a girl got canned for humming an Erasure song while she was churning butter. It’s like, yeah, Erasure is historic, but not historic enough.
Maybe self-destruction is the answer.
They’d told him he had talent. That word was heroin to the young. Talent.
Since boyhood, fury had become his father. His older brother. His only protector. Fury gave him strength and courage and spurred him to always move forward despite always getting things wrong and always failing and no mentor there to help him or teach him and everyone always laughing. Anger delivered him from catastrophe. Rage kept him from going under. It had come to be his greatest asset and only strategy.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be.
It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is. You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product.
No,” Marla says. No, she wants it all. The cancers, the parasites. Marla’s eyes narrow. She never dreamed she could feel so marvelous. She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we’re all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.
When we remember someone as a drunk, a liar, a bully, we’re only creating an excuse for our own poor behavior.
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list... Seeing it down in black and white, somehow you’re always disappointed in your life expectancy. How little you’ll get done. The resume of your future.
That would be like breaking a mirror for showing you the truth.
It’s the sweetest of moments when the fire takes control, and you’re no longer responsible for anything.
There are a lot of good reasons to live, I tell her, and hope she won’t ask for a list.
The Prayer for a Parking Space Oh, divine and merciful God, History is without equal for how much I will adore You, when You give me today, a place to park. For You are the provider. And You are the source. From You all good is delivered. Within You all is found. In Your care will I find respite. With Your guidance, will I find peace. To stop, to rest, to idle, to park. These are Yours to give me. This is what I ask. Amen.
People are all looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right.
Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race across the face of the earth, and shattered their language to keep His children apart.
People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser.
To anyone reading this who isn’t already dead, I wish you luck, honestly I do. You just keep swallowing your vitamins. Keep jogging around reservoirs and avoiding second hand cigarette smoke. Cross your fingers! Maybe death won’t happen to you.