Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time, one could g...
Two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
The world is complicated, she added. You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.
That there’s great joy in thanking.
Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.
It was a passage about a fifty-fifth high school reunion. It began: The list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony-cronehood;...
I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.
I become influenced while I'm reading. 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.
Book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,
There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside. I even take them on trips. Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent-flier miles, they've traveled so much. I ta...
The Bolter
Reading and naps, two of life's greatest pleasures, go especially well together.
It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.
If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family memb...
I particularly like that last phrase, Mom said. About protecting your own happiness.
I gave people who didn’t know what to say the best advice I could muster, which was that it was better to say anything rather than pretend that nothing was wrong. My hunch was that Mom would simply ap...
For this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow.
Feasting the Heart by Reynolds Price,
But mostly, when I look back, what I remember is not Mom rushing about; it’s Mom sitting quietly in the center of the house, in the living room, under the swirling colors of a Paul Jenkins painting; t...
Was just that she felt you were missing the main point—you were focused on one thing when you should have been focused on another.