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Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind.
love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.
In order to have sex, women need to feel loved; but in order for men to feel loved, we need to have sex.
but marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it’s the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. Express gratitude, especially for work that tends to get taken for granted. Identify problems as they arise, remembering that anger is flammable. When you’ve behaved like a donkey, Peter,” the groom smiles at his toes, “remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer. Wrong turns teach us the right way.”
it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.”
and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan.”
Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.
Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides.
Smuggling is a crime against the country of destination, not the country of departure.”
“That’s why Australia and New Zealand’re, like, invasion-proof. Any foreign army’d only get halfway up the beach before the time difference’d kick in, and they’d just like whoa, and collapse in the sand and that’d be it, invasion over.
But, then, whither humanity sans youth? Whither language sans neologisms? We’d all be Struldbrugs speaking Chaucerian.
Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.”
“Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble.
And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, bu...
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writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity.
Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”
“Art feasts upon its maker,”
“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
An unkind describer might refer to her face as like a party nobody’s turned up to.
“Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.”
‘What lives must one day die’ can, in rare instances, be renegotiated.”
“Oil’s running out,”
mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid’s dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China’s a powerhouse—though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state—and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal.
The Kurds have a de facto state; it’s Sunni versus Shi‘a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel’s garbage dumps.
On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharaonic. The world’s twenty-seven richest people own ...
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O...
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an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now buy strawberries at Christmas.”
veritas vos liberabit—
It’s grief for
the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners
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“ ‘I AM the daughter of Earth and Water,’
“And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the oceans and shores; I change, but I cannot die.”
“For after the rain when with never a stain, The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams—”
“Build up the blue dome of air …”
“I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.”
“A cenotaph. A monument to a person who died, often in a war.”
When it rains, the cloud’s used up, so it’s sort of died; and the winds and sunbeams build the dome of blue sky, which is the cloud’s cenotaph, right?
rain that was the old cloud runs to the sea where it evaporates and turns into a new cloud, which laughs at the blue dome—its own gravestone—’cause now it’s resurrected. Then it ‘unbuilds’ its gravestone by rising up into it.
There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling.
if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people.
Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.
understood enough about hypothermia to know a hot bath can trigger arrhythmia and possibly a cardiac arrest,
