Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.
Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don’t know any smokers now, not even my mom.
Vets do what doctors used to – diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.
Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.
I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don’t recognize you any longer, that’s the real compliment.
The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.
Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.
The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I’m being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.
I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.
We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.
We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, “I didn’t realize you were so depressed.” “I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you’ve bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch ’em all carry it off, and you don’t care. That’s more like how it was.
There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother...
Who you are shapes how you are loved.
Evil people must spread their evil everywhere.
Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn’t have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child’s playroom.
Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex.
I’m not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.
She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.
My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.