I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it’s not orderly, and it’s not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.
I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
My worst character flaw that I’m conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It’s paralyzing and boring for people around me.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can’t grab onto.
The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.
You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
She had a brainy girls discomfort about her own beauty and its effects on folks.
Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.
I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.
I’m screaming for help and everybody’s acting as if I’m singing Ethel Merman covers...
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer’s heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.
I am not what you see and hear. -Hal.
Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.