Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.
...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.
There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.
I told Ing once that she dances like a German and she didn't like it, but it's true: she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving children of India.
I want my own bed, in my own apartment. Home sweet home. No place like home. Take me home, country roads. Home is where the heart is. But my heart is here. So I must be home.
I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.
It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humil...
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.
Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.
Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.
I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.
I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote . It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." .
Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.
To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit.
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.
He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.
There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.
I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.
I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in...
