Do not just seek happiness for yourself. Seek happiness for all. Through kindness. Through mercy.
People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.
I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.
You have to trust the words. They do not create anything more than themselves.
I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I’m seeing we don’t live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It’s an infinite playlist.
That’s what the voices in your head are for, to get you through the silent parts.
Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.
She is so lost in her sadness that she has no idea how visible it is.
People often say that when couples are married for a long time, they start to look alike. I don’t believe that. But I do believe their sentences start to look alike.
The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.
She is my first and only love. Most people know that their first love will not be their only love. But for me, she is both.
But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.
Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung.
I don’t want you to think I got through this undamaged, okay? But I’m learning to live with it. Because otherwise, the damage is all you are.
Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty – with empty, you are aware of what’s supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.
Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It’s not like a puzzle piece where there’s an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.
But there was something about you that made me think of sparks and motion.
We’d said we’d keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it’s gone, it’s gone. We should have said we’d keep in words, because they are all we can string between us – words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.
Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.
The more kindness and justice are challenged, the more we must embrace them. Only when you are challenged – and only when you challenge yourself – do you discover what truly matters.