But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing.
Alan had never been stabbed or shot or punctured or broken. Were scars the best evidence of living? If we have not survived something, and thus were certain that we'd lived, we could scar ourselves, couldn't we?
One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
I am the Olympics.
You're not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you're at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven't done anything offscreen in months.
I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.
It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, suspicion, fear.
They took my mother's stomach out six months ago.
Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.
Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.
But see how we are the same? You and I, Will? We both see strangers and we react. We don't like to walk by people without nodding. We're broken when people are rude. We're broken when people can't meet us halfway. We can't accept the limits of normal relationships - chilly, clothed, circumscribed. Our hearts pull against their leashes, Will.
There is travel and there are babies," he said, stepping out. "Everything else is drudgery and death.
So yeah, we put llamas everywhere. That was us. We just liked looking at them, so we bred about six million and spread them around.
We discuss calling the police. We have to quickly review anything that could go wrong if we do. Are our immigration papers in order? They are. Do we have outstanding parking tickets? I have three, Achor Achor two. We calculate whether or not we have enough in checking accounts to pay the tickets if the police demand it. We decide that we do.
People don't like to be kept away from what they want. Especially when it appears within their reach. It makes one doubly angry.
The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.
We thought we young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.
Hand and I needed pants, pants to end all pants—warm and cool, breathing and trapping in, full of pockets.
It was always difficult to get cattle returned once a marriage was dissolved.
You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.
Courage was the beginning, being unafraid, moving ahead, through small hardships, not turning back. Courage was simply a form of moving forward.
Young men need to be kept away from guns, bombs, women, cars, hard alcohol and heavy machinery.
He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.
But Tom," said the moon, "the swinging of your pendulums! Everyone's a pendulum swinging, to and fro, and always you're getting hit by someone else's swinging pendulum. You're minding your own business, but someone else'e pendulum is swinging around, and pow! you get it in the head.
The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older, they say, and they touch our arms gently.
Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage—oop!—yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel.
You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you've done nothing good for yourself. That's the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.
I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster.
Amid the ruins José spoke passionately about the Incas and their beliefs. He told us they had symbols for time: the serpent for the past, the puma for the present, the condor for the future. On.
My voice and movements are restricted by the things I own.
This was uncalled for.
That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion.
I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles.
I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.
This is the peculiar problem of constant connectivity: any silence of more than a few hours provokes apocalyptic thoughts.
We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.
If ever I love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer.
This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
They downloaded another customer query, and Mae scrolled through the boilerplates, found the appropriate answer, personalized it, and sent it back.
She spent her idle time conceiving of musicals that would never be. It was the only medium that could properly express our true madness and hypocrisy---our collective ability to sit in a theater watching lunatics sing nonsense while the world outside burns.
It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.
It seemed the whole world knew this person named Diana, and if the world knew her, the connection between the peoples of the earth was tighter than I had imagined. I wondered if the people of England would mourn if Mike and Grace died. At that time, confused as I was, I imagined that they would.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.
This is why Max loved Mr. Beckmann: he was an equal. He seemed to have navigated his way through seven or so decades of adulthood without forgetting one moment of his childhood- what he loved and hated, feared and coveted.
