Smile first, then speak.
What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropria...
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
What I mean to say is, we had been . Had been . Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads...
We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our c...
Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. Th...
So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lifting a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed.
I'm not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever. There's always opera. There's angel-food cake and neighborhood children caroling, and the lo...
I have plenty of friends, she says.Name one.She looks at me.Which I guess is sort of sweet.
I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave. -- The Great Divider
Based on the experience of my life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it's not broke, don't fix it. And would go even further to: Even if it is br...
Anyway, what I really think good writing does: It enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters. It reawakens the reader to the f...
America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It lo...
A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.Grammy's here! he shouts.He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video g...
A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber. -The Thought Experiment
And that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest,...
Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented...
Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.
The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.
The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather th...