She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forga...
Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past...
The most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those w...
It is the thought that the least efficient way of of finding either happiness or pleasure is to pursue them. Put in terms of happiness, we can see it like this: To be happy you must quite literally "lose yourself". You must lose yourself in some purs...
For more than twenty years, I have been seeking a way to be both rational and spiritual. I have been looking for a ray of hope in an otherwise-compartmentalized world in which people segregate religious aspirations and rationality in the hope of not ...
One of the police found a garden chair that I could stand on and they eyed me suspiciously as I tried to slide through the window. The fleece that I was wearing was padding me out too much so I took it off. I tried again, and this time it was my pen,...
If this were a proper world, beautiful faces would belong to beautiful people. Good people with kind hearts and clever minds would always have bright eyes and dazzling smiles, and bad people would have scraggly hair and warty noses. That way if you s...
But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them t...
The process of having fruitful crops depends on being crushed under the soil, becoming soil, and being no one; only then a second existence becomes possible. So whatever status one has in society, true wisdom requires one to see oneself this way. Ind...
What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should no...
New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual ...
It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemb...
Take a trip in my mind see all that I've seen, and you'd be called a beast, not a human being... Fuck it, cause there's not much I can do, there's no way out, my screams have no voice no matter how loud I shout... I could be called a low life, but li...
I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you al...
It's easy to romanticize the people in our lives that mean something to us. We elevate them onto a higher plane that the rest of humanity. They appear glorious and pristine and full of wonders of the Universe all wrapped up into one person-sized box ...
If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for." Banks tells me. "But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary existence. In some ways, I'm not surprised she's dead. A job,...
I fixed your car," he said, tossing the keys from a jade dish on the little maple end table. I palmed them and eyed him speculatively. "You fixed my car?" "I have walked the earth for more than a century. I managed to pick up some skills along the wa...
Life isn’t fair." I said. "It’s taken me a while to get that. It’s always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You’ll make plans, and it’ll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they’ll be taken away no matte...
she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now...
I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that s...
The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, i...
