One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you...
On this particular day, there was a woman in line right in front of us. She was in her thirties, smartly but not expensively dressed, wearing dark glasses. When she took them off, you could see she’d...
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, writes Kabat-Zinn. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and accep...
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally,
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, had just been published. The other was a Pulitzer Prize–winner, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout,
Every year pancreatic cancer kills more than 35,000 people in America—it’s the fourth leading cause of cancer death.
Books provided much-needed ballast - something we both craved, amid the chaos and upheaval...
Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death. I
All over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter—they wanted books for their children.
You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.
You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.
You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.
You can leave the books that you don't like alone, and let other people read them- ancient scholar Yuan Chunglang
Yes, Mom said. People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt.
We can't do much for the people we've lost, but we can remember them and we can read for them: the books they loved, and books we think they might have chosen. Maybe the reading can help us answer the...
There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything—
The Etiquette of Illness, a book from 2004 by a social worker and psychotherapist named Susan Halpern, who is herself a cancer survivor. The subtitle is What to Say When You Can’t Find the Words. But...
She thought you should be able to keep your private life private for any reason or for no reason. She even felt that way about politicians—so long as they weren’t hypocrites—and worried that we’d neve...
Mom would often talk about a refugee boy she’d met in a hospital in Afghanistan. He was the victim of a land mine and had lost a leg. She said to him that she brought greetings to him from schoolchild...
Mom also believed that there is such a thing as a good secret. Maybe something kind you did for someone but didn’t want that person to know, because you didn’t want him to be embarrassed or feel as th...