We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon – lung-burning; mentholated and pure

Or maybe memories are like karaoke – where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen’s bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn’t even know the...

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have — forget sex — because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look...

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one’s dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forward.

«…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt....

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them...

Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we’re at as a species. What is the search for the next great...

I’d sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of...

Okay, I know–my superpower–I’d be able to shoot lightening bolts out from my fingertips–great big knowledge network lightening bolts–and when a person was zapped by one of those bolts, they’d fall down on their knees...

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be...

Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one’s sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.

I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities – to clarify just who it is we...

Humans are part of nature, and nature is one great big wood chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones, and hair.

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck;...

Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful...

In Canada, when we speak of water, we’re speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul;...

…we’re told by TV and Reader’s Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change–and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens....

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.

The world was so unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I...

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at...

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter...

It’s so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that ‘the world’ is mundanely ‘a planet.’ The former is so holy; the latter merely a science project.

Sólo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la mañana, o mira hacia la tarde que está vibrante de vida y comprende lo que...

Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God – I think that He created anorder for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles,we’re also asking...

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn’t life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it,...

The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.

When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate;...

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in...

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or...

You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

And in his heart, I think, he’s now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I’ve said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump...

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family – it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone’s so poor these days, the ’90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone’s too poor to put up new buildings. He said...

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it...

believe that you’ve had most of your important memories by the time you’re thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don’t register in the same way or...

And his computer’s spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word “Internet”. Come on; World War Two earned it’s capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.

One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world...

I wouldn’t mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we’d all be in the same boat and life wouldn’t be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like....

This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I’m too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family...

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn’t just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I...

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age … pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are...

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as...