Mindfulness - it isn't a trick or a gimmick. It's being present in the moment. When I'm with you, I'm with you. Right now. That's all. No more and no less.
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
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 was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house—be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room—and that was to have your face buried in a book.
The thing about Americans, she said, is that you’re very concerned about everything all the time.
The thank-you thing had been drummed into us intensely when we were growing up. We had three great-aunts, on my mother’s side, who believed that when they dropped a present in the mail, your thank-you...
The Etiquette of Illness, a book from 2004 by a social worker and psychotherapist named Susan Halpern,
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...
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 need to learn to recognize these things right from the start. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.
You can die now, with three healthy children, your husband of almost fifty years alive and well, and five grandchildren whom you love and who love you, all well, all happy’—well, I think Mom would hav...
What's odd about commencement is that so many people think of it as the end of something, the end of high school or college--but that's not what the word means at all. It means the beginning, the star...
We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do. Still, one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dyin...
She never wavered in her conviction that 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 h...
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...
He’s also able to accept death. He’s not happy about it, but he’s perfectly calm. When I stop all this treatment, it will be because it’s time to stop.
You can leave the books that you don't like alone, and let other people read them- ancient scholar Yuan Chunglang