One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

by B.J. Novak

Never, in the history of competition—athletic or otherwise, human or otherwise, mythical or otherwise—has anyone ever kicked anyone’s ass by the order of magnitude that the hare kicked the ass of that goddamn fucking tortoise that afternoon.

slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.

Didn’t they realize how much interesting shit there was to see and do in this world if you just woke up at a normal fucking time like a normal fucking person?

In any case, the point was that on Sundays especially, I really would prefer not to be alone, even though I knew deep down that it was probably better to be alone than to be with fake friends.

I think it’s better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.

It was a far deeper and sharper moment of first love than the first first moment of first love, because now, not only was he falling in love, but he was falling in love with someone he loved; and while the first time, he also believed he’d be with her forever, he was too young to consider what forever meant.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” said Nana. “You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.”

The girl who gave great advice knew how to handle these situations, too. She would lower her head thirty degrees and then tilt it back up after two and a half seconds, and ask at a slightly slower pace in a slightly lower voice: “And what does your …” and then she would say either “gut” or “heart,” just whichever one she hadn’t said before.

Whether the years had finally cracked his spirit, or had finally cracked the shell around his spirit—who was to say, and, really, who cared.

“You need to want it,” I agreed. I told him I stopped because I realized I was turning love into an accomplishment, and he was turning accomplishment into love, and neither of those things would ever quite be the other. When I told him that, he seemed to both light up and flare out at the same time—like he knew this was the truth, but that it was also hard for him to let go of someone who would say something like that.

But nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.

And then, no matter where you are in life, to be able to always look down at those ten little toes that carry you through your house or the hallways of your job or around the same walking path you’ve been walking for years that you still love in a way even though, somehow, at some point, its loveliness lost its dust of luster in your eyes—to know that no matter where you are, no matter how dull the favorite colors of your life become, you can always look down at those ten little toes and think about how they have been with you to a place that almost no one alive can imagine, and no one dead could have conceived of. And then someday, when you’re about to die yourself, and you’re scared, at least you know you’ve already been somewhere mysterious.

The harm, besides those hours that actually do matter when you barely have one night off every couple of weeks, is the little mark you get on you every time you open up a door to a hope and then close it fast in disappointment. It leaves a nick, or a dent, and those nicks and dents are not invisible. I used to see them all the time.

I believe that all of society had its values completely wrong. I feel entitled to say this since all of society has since made the same accusation about me.

After you got over the surprise that you didn’t get what you wanted, why didn’t you want what you got?

“You meet a finite number of people in your life. It feels to you like it’s infinite, but it’s not. I think it’s the biggest thing I can see that you can’t.

There’s always going to be one more thing. Because that’s what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it’s infinite, it’s built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us.

everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite.

President Mandela, you took one of the most unjust nations on earth and made it what it is today: one of the most violent nations on earth. (Laughter)

Poverty, injustice, and violence are among the greatest challenges to human dignity. But if we escape them, we then face a greater, and more beautiful, challenge: the challenge of freedom. When we can say anything, what do we say? When we can feel anything, what do we feel? When we can share anything, what do we share?

“Just tell everyone it’s spelled February but pronounced ‘Feb-u-ary.’ That way, they’ll feel stupid!”