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My brother told me once that he missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him. Fair enough, I said.
The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?
It’s slow today so I help her set up for class. Cushions for the strong, chairs for the weak. “You should stay,” she always tells me, but I never do. Not sure where to sit.
When I come in, the dog is sleeping under the table. Eli is folding a piece of plain white paper. “Don’t look,” he says. “I’m inventing this. No one will ever know what I have done except me.”
My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.
Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?
A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.
There are a lot of questions afterward. Some of them are friendly; some are not. But Sylvia stands firm on her idea that humans are nothing particularly special. “The only thing we are demonstrably better at than other animals is sweating and throwing,” she says.
Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth. (Two strikes then.) …
Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here. …
She gave us a formula: suffering = pain + resistance.
Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.
In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one’s gaze.
wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious reassurance.
