Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It’s not all that great, really. Don’t take it so seriously. Don’t handle it so delicately.
Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.
But when friends would ask Kathy whether they, too, should start their own business, she talked them out of it. You don’t run the business, she would say. The business runs you.
Their howls rose to the sky and twisted together until they were on, and the other beasts joined in too, all of their voices creating a wild, plaintive song of sorry and abandon and anger and love.
We both see strangers and react. We don’t like to walk by people without nodding. We’re broken when people are rude. Were broken when people can’t meet us halfway. We can’t accept the limits of normal human relations-chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes.
The heat was alive, predatory.
The money that could have saved the Shuttle, and the money we send to random countries, that we use to remake unchangeable countries ten thousand miles away.
If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.
We are unusual and tragic and alive.
I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It’s just not my thing anymore.
I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.
You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.
Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.
We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
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.