I used to say that the greatest gift you could ever give anyone is a book. But I don't say that anymore because I no longer think it's true. I now say that a book is the second greatest gift. I've com...
I’d read in Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,
Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett
There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything—
Yes, Mom said. People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt.
You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.
You need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.
You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.
Book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,
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...
Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle.
Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience by Susan Pedersen,
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.
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