She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her...
One of the 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 by h...
Of course, said the Queen, but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting
Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.
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. Yet
I often forget that other people’s stories aren’t simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn fr...
I believe that everything you need to know you can find in a book. People have always received life-guiding wisdom from certain types of nonfiction, often from self-help books . . . . But I have found...
Her new mantra was a piece of wisdom given to her by a friend of my sister who specialized in palliative care: Make Plans and Cancel Them.
Books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grand...
You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.
Why did I always need to do something, like referring one person to another, just for the sake of doing something, when sometimes, perhaps, it was better to do nothing?
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.
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,
Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki,
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 hospital is, as I’ve noted, an interruption machine—a flood of people come to poke you and prod you and ask you questions.
Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts, from Collected Poems Jane Austen Russell Banks, Continental Drift Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Ande...
The apartment is an oasis - of civility, kindness, and elegance.