All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.
We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
... all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and prote...
[bookcover:Lessons Learned|13578440] Another shot, and for some reason, I’m the only one who can’t move. Who can’t scream. Who can’t do anything but watch as the young man’s body slumps over his tray. Finally, I find my voice and scream his...
It's been said that the role of the artist is to teach us to see and that's true. However, the role of other artists is to teach me how they see. To learn how I see is somethig that cannot be taught but must be learned.
...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of...
Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't le...
Your life is your spiritual path. It's what's right in front of you. You can't live anyone else's life. The task is to live yours and stop trying to copy one you think looks better.
A popular myth is that learning is largely a matter of motivation. Increasingly, the key to effective learning in the information era is how you think, not how you feel.
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffe...
You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.
Simply put, the best teachers believe that learning involves both personal and intellectual development and that neither the ability to think nor the qualities of being a mature human are immutable. People can change, and those changes--not just the ...
Learn from me, for as I teach, I learn from you as well! Always be accountable to yourself and take complete responsibility for your own life. No one can do as much for you, as you can do for yourself…
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.
Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of ti...
Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just...
If I could only teach you one thing about the world, it would be to Appreciate and be as present as possible in every moment. Take everything in and try and learn from it. No matter how tangled things get, there is always a lesson to be learned in th...
Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?” he asked. “I have already learned not to speak to strangers.” “Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.” “I am disinclined to know you.
I had a dream about you. You were learning how to swim, and I was learning how to drown. We each studied the other’s technique. Swimming and drowning and both of us doing both taught us a lot about love.
