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Aparicio believed that the number 3 had deep significance. 3. There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being. 33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.
Frankly, I find the professionalization of collegiate sport to be a rather despicable phenomenon.
The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
that I took up my pen in earnest, and began to live; since then, scarcely a week has gone by when I do not feel myself unfolding within myself.
from the hospital gift shop. A hospital that sold cigarettes:
She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.
Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve.
Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between, you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn’t carry your game-time emotions out into the world—you’d be put in an asylum if you did—so you went underground and purged them.
He needed to see for himself. To understand death. To make death real. Your dad said that the need to see for yourself,
Affenlight had a special fondness for reading aloud. Maybe this was part of his instinct for solitude and self-enclosure; a way to reveal himself while hiding behind someone else’s words.
If Henry hurt his elbow, he’d go to the doctor, right? And you’d make sure he had the best doctor money could buy.” “We’re not talking about Henry’s elbow. We’re talking about his head.” “It’s an analogy,”
But guess what? Not everybody wants to maximize their pain. Some people have enough trouble making it from one day to the next.
He liked to suffer for a reason. Who didn’t?
The only thing he knew how to do was motivate other people. Which amounted to nothing, in the end. Manipulation, playing with dolls.
Her first direct contribution to trash collection and public schooling, the maintenance of highways and libraries, the killing of people in war.
This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.
!!!
Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought, or maybe it’s just me: a purportedly intelligent person, purportedly aware of the ways in which women and wage laborers have been oppressed for millennia—and I get choked up because somebody tells me I’m good at washing dishes.
Like an actor in a play, his inner turmoil was on display for everyone to observe; unlike an actor in a play, he didn’t get to go home and become someone else.
How could you learn anything, accomplish anything, build any kind of momentum toward becoming a good person, unless you felt at least a little bit comfortable first?
You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.
A minute ago he’d felt fine, or thought he felt fine, but now the possibility of failure had entered his mind, and the difference between possible failure and inevitable failure felt razor slight.
Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.
All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever.
You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.
To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he’d ever craved since he’d been born.
He had his whole life ahead of him; it wasn’t a comforting thought.
There were two kinds of incompetent con men. Those who talked too much and those who didn’t talk enough.
Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes.
the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo.
Permanent vigilance, because disaster always lurked. The best he could hope for was an instant of peace before the planning began again,
his fear of succeeding, beyond which the world lay totally open to him.
His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He’d never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he’d never be as good as he wanted to be.
A pill was the opposite of what he wanted. A pill was an answer that somebody else had worked hard to come up with. He didn’t want that. A pill was small and potent. He wanted something huge and empty.
He’d never been able to talk to anyone, not really. Words were a problem, the problem. Words were tainted somehow—or no, he was tainted somehow, damaged, incomplete, because he didn’t know how to use words to say anything better than “Hi” or “I’m hungry” or “I’m not.”
Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch.
Deep down, he thought, we all believe we’re God. We secretly believe that the outcome of the game depends on us, even when we’re only watching—on the way we breathe in, the way we breathe out, the T-shirt we wear, whether we close our eyes as the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand and heads toward Schwartz.
“You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.
“Which is partly why your death is so hard for us. It’s hard to accept that a soul like yours, which took a lifetime to build, could cease to exist. It makes us angry, furious at the universe, not to have you here.
