There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.
What I’m primarily saying,′ he says, ’is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.
Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.
I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave. – “The Great Divider.
We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our cave.
The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.
A Clinton staffer tells me his theory. Think about Frank Sinatra, he says: born to sing. Think about Willie Mays: born to play ball. These guys got their power from living lives perfectly suited to their natures. Same with Clinton: his life is perfectly suited to his nature.
In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal.
Why were we made just so, to find so many things that happened every day pretty?
They were both so scared they weren’t talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you’re not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.
To me, the process of writing is just reading what I’ve written and – like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is – looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It’s an exercise in being open to whatever is there.
We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dresssing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow.
So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lifting a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed.
He didn’t like the thought of them knowing he’d been scared. Didn’t like the thought of them knowing what a fool he’d been. Oh, to hell with that! Tell everyone! He’d done it! He’d been driven to do it and he’d done it and that was it. That was him. That was part of who he was.
I’m always aware of writing around things I can’t do, and I’ve come to think that that’s actually what ‘style’ is – an avoidance of your deficiencies.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there’s all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I’m a cloaking device.
The scariest thought in the world is that someday I’ll wake up and realize I’ve been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual.
Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.