You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that’s the secret weapon of the bookstore – is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
The world is not a wish-granting factory.
You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
Francois Rabelais. He was a poet. And his last words were “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.
That smile could end wars and cure cancer.
Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself – if they could live in my memories – would anyone, anyone, love me?
What’s the point in being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.
Easy comfort isn’t comforting.
A desert blessing, an ocean curse.
Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s right. Things couldn’t be righter. Things could be less tired. They could be less busy. They could be less caffeinated. But they couldn’t be righter.
The beautiful thing about driving was that it stole just enough of his attention – car parked on the side, maybe a cop, slow to speed limit, time to pass this sixteen-wheeler, turn signal, check rearview, crane neck to check blind spot and yes, okay, left lane.
Love is tied to truth.
Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime...
I mean, if Hardee’s is urban, I’m not sure I want to see rural.
Tiny Cooper is splayed out across the thin carpet, using his backpack as a pillow. He’s wearing skinny jeans, which look very much like denim sausage casings.
I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my plate.
It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.
We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.
All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.
Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, “Hoc est corpus,” were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as “Hocus-pocus.”