A 15-minute gap in your day is plenty of time to write and read, but not if you check your email first.
It's easy to get four days a week of training in and I don't spend more than 55-60 minutes in the gym.
A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.
This does not come naturally. I have to work out 60 to 90 minutes at least five days a week and stick to a high- fiber, low-calorie eating plan.
My father always used to tell one of his dreams, because it somehow seemed of a piece with what was to follow. He believed that it was a consequence of the thing's presence in the next room. My father dreamed of blood. It was the vividness of the dre...
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our i...
For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no pr...
To realize the value of 1 week, ask an editor of a weekly newspaper. To realize the value of 10 years, ask a newly divorced couple. To realize the value of 4 years, ask a graduate. To realize the value of 1 year, ask a student who has failed their fi...
Peter Warne: You know, I had you pegged right from the jump. Just a spoiled brat of a rich father. The only way you get anything is to buy it, isn't it? You're in a jam and all you can think of is your money. It never fails, does it? Ever hear of the...
[last title cards] Title card: Of the four aircraft hijacked that day, United 93 was the only one that did not reach its target. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03am. No one survived. Title card: Military commanders were not notified ...
Okay, you have to understand I was drunk.” “So?” “So don’t believe anything I said.” “What about now?” “I don’t know. I don’t trust myself around you. Talking to you is like drinking tequila. One minute I’m in control, and the...
Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put th...
Isn’t it weird?” he said, glancing up as I measured salt. “All the variety that life offers? Here we sit, me reading expressions of creativity.” He held up the poetry book, which to my dismay, was now worn and dog-eared. “And you doing scie...
But she wasn't a wife and mother. And, Joey aside, she didn't want to be one. Her mother had spend every last minute cooking for Papa, cleaning for Papa, looking nice for Papa, entertaining for Papa, producing babies for Papa. The measuring stick she...
How is it?" I ask as we stroll towards the dressing rooms. "Working at the playground. That must be fun." "Sure, they're just adorable," she says, "For the first five minutes. And then I want to wring their adorable little necks." I stop, shocked. "I...
Life was about loss. One minute standing on the promise of your dreams, then free-falling backward into nothingness. Is this what it meant to grow old? To gradually be stripped of all you cared about. And then what? Were you supposed to spend the res...
Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday's T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early -- it's summer vacation, after all -- and Tyler can't seem to make him under...
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz m...
I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related...
He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: "What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?" He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening — I do myself som...
You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor tru...
