Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.
I’d read in Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,
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.
Girls Like Us by the journalist Sheila Weller,
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.
Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience by Susan Pedersen,
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...
Joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.
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...
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?
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...
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 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 latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize th...
The Etiquette of Illness, a book from 2004 by a social worker and psychotherapist named Susan Halpern,
The Bolter
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...
Reading is a respite from the restlessness of technology, but it's not only that. It's how I reset and recharge. It's how I escape, but it's also how I engage. And reading should spur further engageme...