Usually, the fairy tale ends with the girl marrying the prince. But mine started as soon as the marriage was over.
When you die, your sister's tears will dry as time goes on, your widow's tears will end in another's arms, but your mother will mourn you until the day she dies.
Satisfaction is the end of success
Wisdom begins at the end.
It’s okay to have differences, to not be like everyone else around you. It doesn’t make you weaker or less worthy than anyone else that might appear normal. It is what it is. You’re just different. At the end of the day, we all want the exact s...
What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, le...
This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying i...
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—decidi...
In the end I chose the names I still liked after repeating then 100 times. It's a foolproof test. You repeat something 100 times and if you still like it it's because it's good. This doesn't just work for names, it works for anything, food or people.
The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.
Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things th...
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me...
I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they a...
She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was...
I felt like a mouse running through one of those cardboard mazes. I didn't have to think about anything I did. My body just...went. The difference was that, unlike the mouse, there was no hunk of cheese waiting for me at the end. No reward of any kin...
Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.
It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. The loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that co...
It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the ...
There's a great difficulty in making choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though c...
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when ni...
