His old man, who’d smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he’d done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.
The sky above was a vault of blackness-and everywhere, the stars!
It’s love that enslaves us... It is the play within the play, the stage on which the tragic drama of our human lives unfold.
In 1945, scientific knowledge leaped way ahead of our maturity as a species. We are still lagging way behind.
A hundred and twelve miles to the north, traveling east on Interstate 76, Kittridge had also begun to worry about fuel.
He felt not surprise or even regret but, rather, a deep and sudden gratitude and, with it, a force of clarity, filling him like a breath of winter air. He wondered what this feeling was and then he knew. He was giving her up.
Auntie had nothing to say to that. Whatever was on this man’s mind, it had nothing to do with her. There were times when you couldn’t fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.
The day-to-day. That was the term they used. Thinking neither of a past that was too much a story of loss and death, nor of a future that might never happen.
It was true what Michael said about him: his blindness wasn’t something missing; it was simply something different.
But he’d done far braver things in his life – all his life – not the least of which was warming another man’s child against his skin while outside the snow poured down, and loving that child so fiercely she became his own. Your daddy.
There is power in a name. It is through names that we bring all things into this world, and when they leave, it is names we carry with us, so they are never truly gone.
I will give you childhood, so that you might know innocence. Age, so you will know the prize of youth. Children, so that you will care for the future. Toil, so that you will know the value of a day. The body’s failings, so that you will know its worth. Death, so that you will cherish the bittersweet beauty of life.
Nevertheless, I stabbed him.
Why do certain arbitrary images stay with us, branded upon the walls of memory, while others sink forever into time’s abyss?
War, pestilence, famine, environmental collapse; vast migrations and fanaticism of every stripe; a world de-civilized as the earth’s peoples, sworn to competing gods, turned upon one another:.
It is within this space that revelations come, and mine is this: there’s only one thing I can do to help my father now, something I have never done before. I kiss him on the forehead. “I love you,” I tell him.
It is the most beautiful star in the history of stars, which is the history of everything.
She did not recall the words, only the idea: that loss was love’s accounting, its unit of measure, as a foot was made of inches, a yard was made of feet.
We look no deeper into things because we do not desire this; neither are we meant to. That is the design of the world, to trick us into believing it is one thing, when it’s entirely another.
Yet something nagged at me. It is impossible, of course, to completely know another person; we are, in the end, prisoners of our own minds.
The mind works wondrously; it is capable of astonishing feats. It is the only machine in nature capable of thinking one thing while knowing its opposite.