And the news got worse. It appeared that there was this whole other person Jesus Christ whose birthday a lot of people tended to confuse with mine. I was personally outraged. It was a long time before I forgave the Lord for that.
He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.
So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.
Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.
Ogni linguaggio è un alfabeto di simboli il cui uso presuppone un passato che gli interlocutori condividono; come trasmettere agli altri l'infinito Aleph, che la mia timorosa memoria a stento abbraccia?
He taught us that everyone has a good story and the more of others you understand, the better your grasp of human nature, a gift given great weight in my family" (73). - Bill Clinton, "Paying Attention
We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.
The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever.
Much of what we called "depression" was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren't willing to work for.
She's thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she'll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.
Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.
Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story—the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.
I am a guy," I say. "And I hate boys," she says. "But a guy's different," I say. "Maybe a little," she says.
Is your life really so bad? This city is full of opportunities –” “Can you call it a city?” Marcus asked. “No gymnasium, no theatre, no forum? Where is the life a Roman man should lead?
It’s a huge thing, this Shift, just as big as I imagined. My brain doesn’t want to think anymore; all of a sudden it wants to do.
I wanted to tell people, "My depression is acting up today" as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off.
I have a system with bathrooms. I spend a lot of time in them. They are sanctuaries, public places of peace spaced throughout the world for people like me.
