How could he find perfection in such an average day? Then I realized this was the whole point.
I am every age, up to my own.
We all know how to be a child.
I worked because I could control it.
We’re Tuesday people.
Tension of opposites.
Kids chase the love that eludes them.
We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.
We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time – we often think they began with our arrival. That’s not true.
Things that happen before you are born still affect you and people who come before your time affect you as well.
If you hold back on the emotions – if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them – you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid.
When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.
Life has to end, love doesn’t.
Suddenly, details seemed extremely important. Details were something to grab on to, a way to insert myself into the story.
I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother’s death-notice telegram or by his father’s corpse in the city morgue.
In heaven, there is no judgment, but rather an opportunity to examine our lives-who we touched, the choices we made, and the consequences of those choices.
You have to work at creating your own culture.
If you really could fit God in a file, you wouldn’t need to believe in God, you know, you’d just go get the file like a box of corn flakes off the shelf.
Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.
My own father didn’t talk a lot about feelings or emotions.