Great news for someone is always bad news for someone else.
Why is it upset? Shouldn’t it be downset?
The light filtered throught the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow.
Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.
The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves.
Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt.
In the contemporary world where things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, you have to imagine a community where there is no centre. Hank, at the end of this year I started thinking that a lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.
She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.
The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I’ve got sarcastic company.
I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my father.
I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.
Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn’t quite allow herself to disappear for good.
In retrospect Hank I don’t know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.
I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.
For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.
Do you guys remember that time when we were all definitely going to die and then Ben grabbed the steering wheel and dodged a ginormous freaking cow and spun the car like the teacups at Disney World and we didn’t die?
The future will erase everything – there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Chip did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.
Dying is the last thing I would EVER do!