Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.
I have witnessed Grandfather cry, and I implore myself to say that I desire to never witness him cry again. If this signifies that I must do things for him so that he will not cry, then I will do those things. If this signifies that I must not look when he cries, then I will not look.
Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.
The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.
What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?
Did she always have something to read in front of her so she wouldn't have to look at anything else?
I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty. ... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.
I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?
I wanted to shout myself into his ear.
It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.
She had been in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love, but rather doing something much more ordinary
The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.
What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?
Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to doà I am not a hero, it is trueà But I am not a bad person, either.
I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.
Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for.
The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.
With writing, we have second chances.
Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.
I don't mind if smiles come at my expense, I'm a small price to pay.
I regret how much I believed in the future.
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness....
It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes
The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
When I looked ay you my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.
Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.
I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
I was more alone than if I had been alone.
It's a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.
Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
For how long could we fail until we surrendered?
I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame.
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.
I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.
I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories