You're a hero and a gentleman, you're kind and honest, but more than that, you're the first man I ever truly loved. And no matter what the future brings, you always will be, and I know that my life is better for it.
Being bound to one particular storyline such that one’s narrative is rigid, does not imply the need to avoid formulating particular other kinds of possibilities. Rather, it involves being stuck in one self-limiting, self-reinforcing set of possibil...
It was all he'd felt for too long to change now. Maybe it was too late for any other kind of life. This was all he knew. It was safe, insulated. Familiar. An absense of emotion kept him sane. Or what passed for it.
Just so you know, I get incredibly bored quite easily and you will be forced to be my source of entertainment. You'll kind of be like my own personal jester." I flipped him off. "Well that wasn't funny at all.
Sometimes it's easy to lose faith in people. And sometimes one act of kindness is all it takes to give you hope again.
It was the kind of smile that no one further than ten inches from her face would perceive. Her expression was so lightly cast to my eyes that had it been a snowflake on my lashes it would have melted away with an accidental blink.
The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishab...
...two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.
I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.
This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
I apologized to her once for spending less time with her, but she blew it off. "You're in love. That makes you actually kind of boring to people who aren't in love. You know, the sane ones.
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
I want someone who puts the whole ball of wax at risk. I want the kind of marriage where we would follow each other out into the stormy fatal sea or I'm not marrying at all.
Suffering can thus be seen in large part as a kind of resistance or reactivity to the pain of the present moment. (p. 74)
It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.
I miss the days of burning your kind at the stake. For generations we have settled for financial ruin and ostracization of your whorish ancestors - but know this, I will personally gut you and put your head on a pike in my parlor.
He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.
Every other person in the world would have looked at it and thought, Max would hate this. It was girly. It was beautiful. It wasn't made of titanium and black leather with spikes on it. But it seemed exactly right, in a weird, heart-fluttery kind of ...
She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.
The first time I died, I didn't see God. No light at the end of the tunnel. No haloed angels. No dead grandparents. To be fair, I probably wasn't a solid shoo-in for Heaven. But, honestly, I kind of assumed I'd make the cut.
