No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality

by Michael J. Fox

If an injury hurts immediately, I know for sure it’s benign; but pain that intensifies after a few minutes is reporting real damage.

It’s not what a character reveals, it’s what he’s hiding that’s intriguing.

I felt free to concentrate on what any actor, able-bodied or not, is charged with accomplishing: uncovering the internal life of another human being.

There’s a consistency in the best work of Pollard and these others; a fluidity and integrity. Free of the onus of carrying the story, they can explore the idiosyncratic and even the extreme.

I’ve read that while learning how to walk, toddlers fall an average of twenty-one times an hour.

It’s not that I tried to hurt myself; it’s that I didn’t try hard enough not to hurt myself. It was hubris. Unfettered pride. And you know what pride goeth before … Actually, you may not. The precise wording of the Proverb is: Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Both women hail from Galway, but their accents are slightly different; if Clara’s sings, Brigid’s crackles, slices and rises at the tail of the final syllable, as if she is in a constant state of dubiousness.

the more unexpected something is, the more there is to learn from it.

That’s how I feel about time with my family. I can’t always go where they go, when they go there. My participation is syncopated. I want to be a companion, not a responsibility—or worse, a liability. By just showing up, I provide an X factor that can drastically alter their experience. So I pick my moments: when to join in, and when to stay home.