A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions (...) if one has failed only where others have not had the courage or w...
I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen didn't. But half our life is dreams, delirium, everything that underlies that feeds that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi- sanity, we allow others to see. Th...
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one mak...
As the boys screamed and hauled off handfuls of mulch, Olivier had slowly, deliberately, gently taken Gabri’s hand and held it before gracefully lifting it to his lips. The boys had watched, momentarily stunned, as Olivier had kissed Gabri’s manu...
I'm not frightened. I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you enter...
Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit. These are the things all the great philosophers just won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathing And you keep writing-creating because that’s what you do And ...
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is tru...
The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifes...
Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so...
All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured clas...
Even when there were good wars to write about, writers such as Jane Austen wrote novels concerning marriage. They usually went like this: 'You're being a real jerk.' 'Sorry about that. I was secretly helping you.' 'Oh, you're wonderful! And you have ...
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of cours...
Today more than ever before, its time to go through with life. Stop thinking so hard about what it is that you want to do. Go out and conquer your dreams! Only you can walk your path. Remember that inner voice and use it to drive yourself straight to...
When I focus on the way "men" or "husbands" generally behave, I start to lump Jamie along with half of humanity. I find myself feeling angry or annoyed with Jamie for things he hasn't even done.
When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, "What human condition deserves...
Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world...
I wanted intimacy in caps lock but I got it in parentheses. We curled into each other, upside down, my empty spaces filled by another. "Give me the three minute version of your life story," he said. I nailed it it one then refused to throw the questi...
He parked his car carefully, made sure he'd set all the locks and the alarm. On the steps he kept looking behind him, snapping glances into shadows like he expected this to be a set-up with my gang waiting to roll him. Nervous. But I got this feeling...
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the grou...
Life cracks us into unrecognizable shards of former incarnations. Slivers of our hurt and our pain and our shame nestles next to fragments of our truth, our divinity, our fierce reclamation of power. It is this very brokenness that allows us to knit ...
No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those too...
