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...

Is that all time is – our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?

You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, ‘Hey! You’re...

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating...

By the age of twenty, you know you’re not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you’re not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness...

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally...

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it...

Hi! I’m Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!

And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical...

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding’s predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars...

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word...

Failure is authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s real and genuine, and because of that, it’s a pure state of being.

I hate math. It’s hard, it’s stupid, and it’s nature’s way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.

I don’t think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that’s always thinking. A good...

Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders...

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don’t (…) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two...

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints….I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren’t the books...

Post-adolescent Expert SyndromeThe tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die...

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French? Dieu!...

When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life...

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.