The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older.
It’s not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that’s not read friendship.
It is the same with anything – you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.
People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
What do I like about math?, When I’ve got figures in front of me, it relaxes me. Kind of like, everything fits where it belongs.
A person’s last moments are an important thing. You can’t choose how you’re born but you can choose how you die.
Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.
Can’ttrustpeople. Won’tdoanygood. They’llkillyoueverytime. They’llkilleachother. They’llkilleveryone.
I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It’s like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I’ll finish it.
All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious.
By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.
Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial.
I’d made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.
Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.
This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I’ve somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.
They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?
It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it.
I’m not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don’t enjoy the writing, I stop.