Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.
I often cannot believe the things I do.
People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.
Some of these kids just don’t plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.
I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind.
But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
3. There are bears and there are small dogs. Be strong like bear! If they take out your teeth, sit on the dogs. Bears always forget they can just sit on the dogs. Sit on the dogs.
Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?
Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
When there is pleasure, there is often abandon, and mistakes are made.
I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.
Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.
I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I’m very happy.
It is no way to live, to wait to love.
We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.
Be strong, be brave, be true. Endure.
Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.
We were fools and now we were driving to our deaths in a rental car. Janet Jackson was tinkling from the speakers, asking what we had done for her as of late.