Strange how the deepest part of us isn’t able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world.
In this momentous night, however, he knew far more sadness than grief, and while deep sadness bruises the heart, it doesn’t leave the enduring scars of profound grief.
Chronologically she is twelve, but emotionally she is older, and intellectually older still.
I need useful work to keep my mind occupied, but I’d like to find work where it’s... quieter.
You do what you have to do. That’s who you seem to be to me, anyway. You’re one who does what he has to do.
I took comfort that its IQ, while no doubt high enough to allow it to run for elective office, seemed to be only a fraction of mine.
When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she’d made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and as a failure.
When you realize you’re fighting a fundamental law of the universe, it’s best to surrender to nature.
The stairs creaked. They always creaked when creaking could lead to your death, and they never creaked when creaking didn’t matter. The universe is anthropic, meaning that its design makes possible and sustains intelligent life, especially human beings. Nevertheless, I perceive some power, some presence, some adversary behind the scenes that by countless devices subtle or blunt seeks to destroy us.
But the universe in its immensity is nevertheless of a piece, and what applies at one end of it applies at the other. No doubt misery, like happiness and hope, is found throughout the stars.
I will hold her hand at the end, and I will pass soon after, for we are one heart, and neither of us would be of use without the other.
Sometimes, when someone has led a nearly perfect life but is not yet worthy of nirvana, that person is reincarnated as a very beautiful dog. When the life as the dog comes to an end, the person is reincarnated one last time as a human being, and lives a perfect life. Your dog is a person who has almost arrived at complete enlightenment and will in the next life be perfect and blameless, a very great person. You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul.
I never plan for the future but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck.
When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty.
People should matter more than ideas.
I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they had warmed me all my life.
Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army.
We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self interest.
Everyone, Pax believed, was more than she or he appeared to be, and one of the saddest things about the human condition was that most people never realized what talents, capacities, and depth they possessed. That Pogo had taken a full measure of himself must be one reason that Bibi so loved him.
He can’t always watch us directly,... with his fullest attention every minute, but He’s always at least watching from the corner of his eye.