The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banalit...
We're the expendable half of the species, ladies. We're designed to take down the bad guys, to save the children. We're your weapons, your attack dogs. We're ready to i.e. taking down the threats against you. There isn't much call for this in the twe...
Getting what you want means making the decisions you need to make to get what you want. Not the decisions those around you think you should make. Making the safe decision is full, predictable and elads nowhere new. The unsafe decision causess you to ...
You see, mzungus make these programmes because in their countries they know that everything will work correctly. And when they come to Uganda they still make their programmes but they forget that things don't work here like they do when they are at h...
But behind each player sttod a line of ghosts unable to win. Eve. Ashputtel. Marilyn Monroe. Rapunzel slashing wildly at her hair. Bessie Smith unloved and down and out. Bluebeard's wives, Henry VIII's, Snow White cursing the day she left the seven d...
I had a dream about you. You made phone books for a living, and I filled up your pages by impregnating as many women as possible. You said I was a living saint, and I said I couldn’t argue with you there. It’s too bad I can’t get a tax write-of...
–Don’t you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men? – – –I don’t know. Could be. –The men who haven’t gotten the work they expected to get. The men who don’t get th...
He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you." "I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've...
Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How ewe appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or b...
I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehum...
Is this Clarissa Fray?" The voice on the other end of the phone sounded familiar, though not immediately identifiable. Clary twirled the phone cord nervously around her finger. "Yeees?" "Hi, I'm one of the knife-carrying hooligans you met last night ...
Hey, pretty thing," he said. "What's in the bag?" "Holy water," said Jace, reappearing beside her as if he'd been conjured up like a genie. A sarcastic blond genie with a bad attitude. "Oooh, a Shadowhunter," said the vampire. "Scary." With a wink he...
Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people ...
Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embel...
Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his fam...
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day w...
My father had the spirit and integrity of a scientist, but he was a salesman. I remember asking him the question "How can a man of integrity be a salesman?" He said to me, "Frankly, many salesmen in the business are not straightforward--they think it...
The taxi driver felt that it was a good observation, and said he was planning to build for the future, too: he had some money on the horses, and if he won, he would buy his own taxicab, and really do well. I felt very sorry. I told him that betting o...
All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some ...
I think as a society we forget that men also have daddy issues, they've also had bad childhoods, they're vulnerable beings.. They also need love. We are made to think men don't have a hard time, and that's mainly because we've trained them not to sho...
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, bu...
