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So how do you build your soul? At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work you’re required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life.
Her first feeling every morning was shame about all the things wrong in the world that she wasn’t trying to fix.
“The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”
I felt so moved then—shivering at the thought of a divine love that accepts us all, in our entirety.
started me on a path of chasing one fruitless prospect after the next, always dissatisfied, heading farther and farther away from the good, picking up men and dropping them.
We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.
She looked at the same time like a little girl, a sexy woman, and a man.
wish i could buy a house for a friend like i can buy a cake.
This is the great privilege of being a woman—we get to decide.
For most of my life, one thing led to the next. Each step bore its expected fruit. Every coincidence felt preordained. It was like innocence, like floating in syrup. People were brought to me. Luck unfurled at the slightest touch. I had a sense of the inevitability of things as they occurred. Every move felt part of a pattern, more intelligent than I was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I knew this was my greatest duty—this was me fulfilling my role.
They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.
But life isn’t only where things are exciting; it’s where things feel hard and stagnant, too.
In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful.
The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult.
They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger.
It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose
The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves.
They must give themselves completely to the experience! One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy—really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.
May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot. But I live in a culture of fucking idiots. I cannot be saved if not everyone is saved. If everyone around me talks nothing but shit, how can I hold myself aloof? My fate is not separate from everyone’s fate.
The rule is: drink as much as you can afford to drink.
Everyone enjoys economy for its relation to a certain morality, but if I have to suffer from other people’s excesses, why should I not suffer doubly from my own?
Other people knew how to think, I thought, had opinions on things, a point of view. I did not.
you have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.
To lack an overwhelming empathy. I sometimes feel pretty paralyzed by my own feelings of empathy. And it’s still such a problem—shame. Maybe what I want in my life is to cut out a bit of the empathy and a bit of the shame.
thought if I went to clown school, I might know it too.
1. (sighs) I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl … who was as serious as I was.
but somehow it all felt possible. It suddenly felt like the simplest thing.
When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type.
One is a reproduction of the human type—one sleeps like other humans, eats like other humans, loves like other humans, and is born and dies like all other humans. We are gestures, but we less resemble an original painting than one unit of a hundred thousand copies of a book being sold.
When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven’t said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I’ve made for myself that I don’t follow—I see that I’ve done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I. In fact, apart from being the only person living in this apartment, I’m not sure what distinguishes me.
When they talk, they are carried on a sea of their own belonging. It is like they were born to be fathers to us all.
I wondered at this; was there something in his hand or his soul—or elsewhere—that was essentially him, so much so that it compelled me every time, and made me love everything that was his, without even knowing it was?
Had my every act, all along, just been guilt-drenched empathy for the perversions of the world?
Who cares? There would be no answers for me ever. I wanted to lose everything I ever had, or win back everything I had ever lost.
The solution was not to speak less but to speak more, and not through you, but through myself.
“Perhaps it’s evolutionary,” he said. “If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions—how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that’s an inevitable part of life—maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.” “Or maybe,” I said, “the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it.”
for all of our fears and all of our certainty, the bonds that unite us will remain a secret from us, always.
There was always a fear in me of what choice would make me less human, that a lapse could be like a pink eraser and smudge me.
Everything that happens to man conforms to the well-worn patterns of humanity.
These fences do not protect what we value from other people, like those fences that prevent things from being stolen away. These are fences against our own selves; against what in our selves can chase what we value away.
