A 'C' means you've done average work. There's nothing shameful about being average. You didn't fail. You didn't even come close. You did what you were supposed to do. Cheerfully accepting the C means...
3. You don’t have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough.
I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute.
Halpern wants the reader to think about the difference between asking How are you feeling? and Do you want me to ask how you’re feeling?
A father and his son are in a terrible car crash. The father is killed instantly—but the son survives, barely, his life hanging in the balance. He’s rushed to the hospital and into surgery, but there’...
SThat’s enriched my life more than I can say. Of course you could do more—you can always do more, and you should do more—but still, the important thing is to do what you can, whenever you can.
Reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose -- electronic or printed or audio -- is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation.
Even the stay-at-home mothers subjected their kids to a kind of benign neglect back then.
Asked: And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you? Of course not—I’d read it first. I don’t think I could have stood the suspense if I hadn’t known what was going to happen. I’d have been way to...
A pamphlet that she’d been handed when she was visiting an African country where people were able to vote freely for the first time. The pamphlet was called The Ten Commandments for Voters,
When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter--they wanted books for their chil...
We all owe everyone for everything that happens in our lives. But it's not owing like a debt to one person- it's really that we owe everyone for everything. Our whole lives can change in an instance-...
This, I finally realized, was how Mom was able to focus when I was not. It was how she was able to be present with me, present with the people at a benefit or the hospital. She felt whatever emotions...
There's one question I think we should ask of one another a lot more often, and that's What are you reading?It's a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives, creating a shared univer...
The day’s passage was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It read: That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall...
If you stayed at home, you might not get the opportunity to go to that place again. But if you went, you could always com back.
I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started, brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask; How is this book cha...
I can’t see giving up real books, she said. And I love that I can give away my books after I’ve read them. Think of the first edition of The Magic Mountain I’m giving Nico. It was printed along with t...
How great, I thought, to honor people while they are still alive.
Everyone doesn't have to do everything, she told me. People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging thin...