Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning. You notice, there’s nothing in there about a salary.
Well, I have to look at life uniquely now. Let’s face it. I can’t go shopping, I can’t take care of the bank accounts, I can’t take out the garbage. But I can sit here with my dwindling days and look at what I think is important in life. I have both the time – and the reason – to do that.” So, I said, in a reflexively cynical response, I guess the key to finding the meaning of life is to stop taking out the garbage?
Ruby stepped toward him. “Edward,” she said softly. It was the first time she had called him by name. “Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
You lose something every day you live, Annie. Sometimes it’s as tiny as the breath you just expelled, sometimes it’s so big you think you won’t survive it.” He took her left hand. “But you do, right?
War never stops; it only pauses.
Look and see, for everyone is coming home. Your sons are coming from distant lands; your little daughters will be carried on the hip. Your eyes will shine and your hearts will thrill with joy.
I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the lure of advertised values, to pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.
Winds blew,” she said. Tolbert left, never knowing another wind that had blown, one he had diverted, yanking Paulo to the side of the road on that rainy night, preventing a speeding car from striking him, a tragedy that a different version of the world had planned, a version that did not grant Annie and Paulo even one night of marriage, nor the child that would come from it. But there are so many times our lives are altered invisibly. The flip of a pencil, from written to erased.
I am Music. And I am here for the soul of Frankie Presto. Not all of it. Just the rather large part he took from me when he came into this world. However well used, I am a loan, not a possession. You give me back upon departure. I.
And, age is not a competitive issue.
She hugged her arms around his chest and leaned her head into his shoulder. She did this every night, and like most small demonstrations of love, it had a large impact. Dor felt a surge of calm whenever she held him, like being wrapped in a blanket, and he knew no one else would ever love or understand him the way she did. He nestled his face into her long dark hair, and he breathed a way he never breathed except when he was with her.
How did you survive?” she asked. “All that time with your wife not with you?” “She was always with me,” he said.
They don’t know what they want in a partner. They don’t know who they are themselves – so how can they know who they’re marrying?
So he said it now, a true sentence for a false reason.
People lament that if their loved ones had been born fifty years later, they might have survived what killed them. But perhaps what killed them is what led someone to find a cure.
I split my adolescence between the pulpy smell of books, which was my mother’s passion, and the leathery smell of baseball gloves, which was my father’s.
But a clock ticks for all of us, silently, somewhere.
I had told him I was searching for my keys, that’s what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.
My days were full, yet I remained, much of the time, unsatisfied. What happened to me?” – Mitch.
Unlike any man before him, Dor was being allowed to exist without getting older, to not use a single breath of the numbered breaths of his life. But inside, Dor was broken. Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up.