If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.
But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.
People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or ma...
In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I'm rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I've survived, I mu...
The next morning, I worked out at Murakami’s dojo in Asakusa. When I arrived, the men who were already training paused and gave me a low collective bow—a sign of their respect for the way I had dispat...
If I have to err, it’s on the side of assuming the worst. This way, if I’m wrong, I can always apologize. Or send flowers. You err on the other side, the flowers will be coming to you.
I can’t tell you. But we know. She took a sip of caipirinha. Just trust me. I laughed. She retracted her head in mock indignation. But I trusted you. I got you out of his suite, didn’t I? When you tho...
Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.
We shall not cease from exploration, some poet wrote. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time. How incredibly fucking depressing.
It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.
In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you’ve basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attac...
I wish I’d told her I loved her. It bothers me that I didn’t. I’d been so close, and then I’d held back. I tell myself it would have made no difference, and I believe that’s true. But at least then sh...
I read Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self’s buy-in for behavior it would never otherw...
But then, as seemed always to be the case when she found herself hit by a wave of happiness, or joy, or delight, there was an immediate undertow of sadness.
But denial . . . well, you know what they say about denial. Ben nodded, seeing where this was going now, not wanting to show what he really thought of it. It has no survival value.
But accurate insights might have helped me. Medicine isn’t supposed to taste good—that’s what candy is for. Medicine is supposed to make you better.
Suffering in the midst of the vast city from solitude so acute that not even the narcotic of late-night television talk shows could distract them from occasional nocturnal forays in search of signs of...
After our split, I wanted to believe that whatever had been between us was unique, that it could never happen again. Because if it was exceptional, it must be an exception, maybe even the exception th...
There aren’t many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.
The mindfulness he spoke of was called nen in Japanese—an acknowledgment, an appreciation, of the importance of small things. The things that make living more worthwhile. And that, in my work, make it...