You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.
To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.
I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.
How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use.
Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.
Yeah, well, we’re all grieving in our own way, obviously. It’s just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she’d turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. “Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let’s see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys – ” He snapped his fingers. “Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.
Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this okay?
The interesting people are always immoderate.
Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.
The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.
Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete.
The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging.
Attempting to write an honest essay doesn’t alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.
It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.
Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.
I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.
Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.
As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.
The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He.
It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.