If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever.
He wished he was with his mom in her library, where everything was safe and numbered and organized by the Dewey decimal system. Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking f...
I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.
Age did not have to prohibit or inhibit a woman’s ability to make money or a living. Age did not diminish a woman’s usefulness as a self-employed person or entrepreneur. Age did not limit the ways in which a woman made money through self-employme...
I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breat...
There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.
The truth is that we don't want to be saved by in the way God has chosen; we want to keep absolute control over our every step, to be fully conscious of our decisions, to be capable of choosing the object of our devotion. It isn't like that with love...
Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from th...
Be an independent thinker at all times, and ignore anyone who attempts to define you in a limiting way.
Asshole," Ephraim muttered as he turned back around. Chris chuckeled. "Is that really any way to talk to your favorite child?" "You're not my favorite," Ephraim argued, but they both knew that was bullshit. "I don't have any favorites." "Puhlease," C...
For a woman the objective is often a committed relationship also known as the destination. For a men roadtrip on the way to the destination is often the more fun.
Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul ma...
You're- you're not going to force me to go back are you?" he said. "Um?" said the duke. He waved his hand irritably. "No, no," he said. "Not at all. Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.
I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian las...
...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
Ger says that Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
There are those amongst us who have erred, deeply and significantly. Who have wounded the world and broken themselves. The worst of them lose themselves in their errors. The best of them crawl back, one foot at a time, and seek to amend their breache...
Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can...
I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I'd consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.
a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.
