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What can parents do but give their children the space to be, and allow them to do what they need so they can become more of themselves?
No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of “I love yous” we can say to them. That, too, is a fact.
When life is full of tasks, obligations, and events, time carries us, too swiftly it seems, for is it not our perpetual protest about life that there is not enough time for this or that?
one wants to know the best of people, but one also wants to know the worst of people, which is not a necessity for living, but it is a necessity for writing fiction.
Words, words, words. Words form castles on the solid ground and in the clouds, words become armors and prison walls, words make riptides and quicksands. One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words; and yet, where else can my mind live but in words?
When freedom was lost, when sanity was lost, and when reality was lost, words became one of the few possessions that could not be taken away.
“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, a comedy for those who think,” said a mind from the past (credited variously as Horace Walpole, Jean Racine, Jean de La Bruyère).
There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books, however, offer the approximation of it.
Writing, too, offers the approximation of salvation.
No one’s abyss is more or less abysmal than another person’s, just as no one’s bliss is more or less blissful than another person’s.
What is the difference between being mad and being in an abyss?
we all live in stories that cannot be fully told; very few people in the world deserve our tears.
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Writing, offering a transient refuge, is an approximation of salvation, nothing more.
There is no shared abyss; we each dwell alone in our own.
Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn’t always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it. The gap between worth doing and being able to do is where aspiration dwells for the young and decline lies in wait for the old.
by my calculation only ten percent of life is made of things and people we love, and for that ten percent—the real joy of living—we must endure the other ninety percent.
I do believe that we learn to suffer better. We become more discerning in our suffering: there are things that are worth suffering for, and then there is the rest—minor suffering and inessential pain—that is but pebbles, which can be ignored or kicked aside. We also become less rigid: suffering suffuses one’s being; one no longer resists.
Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.
Life is a comedy for those who think.
There are times in life when the world seems to stand still, and when it turns again, nothing is as before.
