He’s at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.
One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.
Human beings are millions of things in one day.
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
When you’re unhappy, I guess everything in the world – reading, eating, sleeping – has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.
I’d thought I’d live with my wife, but I couldn’t find one.
Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.
It’s music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you’re being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you’re carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead.
Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they’re not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.
Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money.
I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.
The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.
We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.
What went wrong? Nothing and everything.
You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
I’m simply pointing out that what happens to us isn’t the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we’re not together.
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself.
We’re here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
When your sad – like really sad – you only want to be with other people who are sad.