They called each other family and that’s what they were—sisters. Many people in the world had family of the heart, kin by choice rather than by blood, and hers had come along in her darkest hour and saved her life.
We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?
I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines.
This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.
Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.
She wondered how Dr. Watson - a clever man in his own right - had lasted so many years without bashing his roommate over the head out of sheer frustration.
True, science has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even placed human beings on the moon, and yet when a man of eighty is left in a room with two eighteen-year-old cocktail waitresses nothing happens.
One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours´ sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory.
He knew from experience that true and obvious ideas, such as the ineffable wisdom and judgment of the Great God Om, seemed so obscure to many people that you actually had to kill them before they saw the error of their ways...
It’s been so many years since I actually had a date that I’ve forgotten how to act. You don’t mention your ex when you’ve finished fucking your date; it’s poor protocol
And though I was currently living a fairy tale, some part of my soul knew that happiness couldn't last forever. I didn't deserve a happily ever after, and there weren't many other cards to play when that was the truth.
...the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.
Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19)
Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.
Like I've said before, so many times before, I'm not a good person, I'm not a hero. I'm a criminal, a liar, a cheat, a killer. It was them or me and I wanted to live.
So many people hate me and love me for the exact same reasons. This is all the proof I need that my opinion about myself is the only opinion I should ever care about.
I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.
I've had a lot of therapists, so I've had the opportunity to approach my fear in many different ways. I've faced it head on and sideways and tried to tiptoe up behind it.
Novels can tell us so much about life. They have the power to enrich our own lives in so many different ways. They're not just for entertaining us, although that would be enough.
I've decided that I'm going to collect as many spiders in a jar as I can and then pour them all over you, William Flecter. Seeing as how it's good to face your fears.
