There’s never a false note in a Berg novel.
He’d been single for so long, and the more I knew him, the more I saw the loneliness at his core. I felt like I brought him to life. He.
Self-pity isn’t the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it: sad for me, I’m hurt. What’s missing is the other half: and you need to do something about it.
That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one’s mental state and, worse, the outcome of one’s life.
She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss.
He smiled like a cat with fresh chipmunk blood on his whiskers.
Perfectionism is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If.
I hate when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC.
I realized I could do anything to him and he would never hate me. I could never drive him away, spoil things between us, or otherwise sour things in his eyes, because he already knew how horrible I could be, yet he loved me, anyway.
So if you think the job really suits you, be you.
The truth is that life itself is brutally, obscenely unfair. Consider all those other millions of sperm cells that were just as good as the one that resulted in you, and where are they now? Dead, nowhere.
There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief.
Dutch isn’t easy for the outsider to learn, because it’s spoken from the back of the throat at the trigger spot for the gag reflex. In order to make the correct sounds, you have to have quite a bit of phlegm at the ready, which is probably why everybody smokes. Nonsmokers can’t even understand Dutch, let alone speak a single word of it. The.
Oh my God, I think. I envy people who are so easygoing, but I also don’t understand them at all.
The decided mind is a closed mind. A closed mind can keep you separated from the ultimate truth.
See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to you chin? What’s the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin? Bubble gum. You have to take the bubble gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it’ll pick it up. Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.
You can never replace it. The good news is you do learn to live without it. You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.
My youth is gone, but something far better has taken its place.
What’s painful and wonderful about loving somebody is loving their small things, like the way he is able to smile when he sips his wine, the way his hands fall down at his sides, fingers slightly cupped, or the way he is conducting the orchestra on the radio. Or now, the way he is lighting candles, just now this one in front of me. This is the one he lit first, actually. The one in front of me. Even though there was one on the way, he passed that one, lit it next.
I hate having feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings? One minute I feel excited, the next I feel terrified. One minute I feel free and the next I feel doomed. I think about lobotomies. Are they like nose jobs, can you just go and have one? Or do you need a doctor’s recommendation?
Then you get pubic hair and everything changes. Pubic hair signals the beginning of your demise. After pubic hair comes high school, college, work. By the time you’ve started working, you’re ruined. And you will never make a friend as completely and easily as you did when you still wiped your nose on your sleeve.