There is nothing about resilience that I can say that my father did not first utter silently in eighteen years of living inside a two-dimensional cutout of himself.
She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails.
The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.
I certainly have a lot to lament, as do we all, everybody has their griefs. But the griefs we can fix, shouldn’t we go around fixing them?
You’re young. Maybe there’ll be time for a do-over if you don’t get it right the first time. But there are no guarantees. There will come a time as it has for me when there’s no time for a do-over.
Either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying.
I would have made different choices. You know, I might have married somebody else.
I’ve spent a lot of words on my own mortality.
I think that we’re foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can.
I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.
I’m a recovering lawyer. The practice of law has changed. Every agreement is a fight.
I’m actually one of those people who get up energetic in the morning.
I’m not a victim – I never want to be perceived that way.
I’ve had experiences that, you know, really couldn’t be replaced.
My father had gone to Vietnam.
It’s more likely in America that your parents will file for bankruptcy than divorce. We think of divorce as so prevalent, but we all know that happens because somebody moves out of the house.
The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered... We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.
And although we can escape something’s presence, there is no way to escape its absence.
In the end, there is peace. If we are strong, if we are resilient, if we are stubborn and filled with hope, if we know how to love, there is peace before that, too. And, honestly, that is enough.
I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me. I saw my death not simply as a transition for my family but as my complete erasure from my family’s life.
But we cannot, they cannot turn back. This is the life we have now, and the only way to find peace, the only way to be resilient when these landmines explode beneath your foundation, is first to accept that there is a new reality.