So keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe.
One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways pain is the opposite of...
Of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him-inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him,...
No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me.
Muhammad brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment and everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddah held out hope that the suffering could be transcended. Jesus bro...
Maybe there's something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters.
Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or w...
Like all sick children, he answered dispassionately, you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.
It's fine, I repeated. And whatever. It was fine. It had to be.
It is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves. Easy enough to say when you’re a...
Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.
Imagine you're trying to find someone, or even you're trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is ai...
If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
I think maybe I know why,' she finally said.'Why?''Maybe all the strings inside him broke,' she said.
I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the fina...
I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my pl...
I go to seek a Great Perhaps. a
I fear your faith has been mis- placed—but then, faith usually is.
I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie, he said as he pulled on black socks. It's a bit festive, given the occasion, I responded. Can't wear it to the opera, said the Colonel, almost smiling. Can...
I can only hope, Julie said, turning back to Gus, they grow into the kind of thoughtful, intelligent young men you’ve become.I resisted the urge to audibly gag. He’s not that smart, I said to Julie.Sh...