No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.
I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.
Age certainly hadn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
With each passing moment I’m becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you – you should control them.
Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.
I’m kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn’t suit me. I’m more of a side dish – cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.
People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That’s what can move the world. That’s art.
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.
Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They’ve got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.
As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.
I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.