Show us life, now
One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically...
It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting.
It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.
If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him. Most people don...
I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way.
I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.
For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couple and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holdin...
Fear was for poor people. Maybe this was the happiest I’d ever been.
And together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little.
Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.
This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it i...
Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.
The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in par...
The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up.
People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song 'Break on Through (To the Other Side)'. But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was p...
It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.
It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone's true course and there's nothing to be done about it.