At Sea Oak there's no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx. Min and Jade are feeding their babies while watching How My Child Died Violently. Min's my sister....
And I woslike: O wow.
After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that...
A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.
This meal we just ate? says Aunt Lydia. In many countries, this sort of meal would only be eaten by royalty.There are countries where people could live one year on what we throw out in one week, says...
The work that stirs the greatest passion is also the work that creates around it the greatest silence, the strongest imperative to stand back and admire and let others admire, without interfering.
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human...
Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth?Those who were kindest to you, I bet.It's a little facile, maybe,...
Oh, the pathos of it! - haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The imp...
Note to self: Try to extend positive feelings associated with Scratch-Off win into all areas of life. Be bigger presence at work. Race up ladder (joyfully, w/smile on face), get raise. Get in best sha...
No, war will not be stopped. But it is a comfort, in the midst of a war, to read an antiwar book this good, and be reminded that just because something keeps happening, doesn't mean we get to stop reg...
Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
In spite of the strife the stars were bright as crystal.
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought...
When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may hav...
What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.
We consider speech to be the result of thought (we have a thought, then select a sentence with which to express it), but thought also results from speech (as we grope, in words, toward meaning, we dis...
My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.
I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst. I had reason to know this. Ha...
I can look back and see that I've spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push being kind to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief...