Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.Collection: Art
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.Collection: Grieving
I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.Collection: Believe
...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.Collection: Believe
The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.Collection: Religious
The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.Collection: World
She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.Collection: Labels
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.Collection: People
sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.Collection: Sarcasm
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.Collection: People
It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.Collection: Song
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?Collection: Lonely
Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.Collection: Lying
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.Collection: Cutting
I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevityCollection: Twenties
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?Collection: Life
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.Collection: Missing Someone
Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.Collection: Crush
Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.Collection: Art
I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.Collection: Hurt
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.Collection: Fire
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.Collection: Hurt
The point of books is to combat loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").Collection: Eating
This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.Collection: Self
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.Collection: Character
Mediocrity is contextual.Collection: Mediocrity
every failure is also a victory.Collection: Victory
It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.Collection: Smart
...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.Collection: Guarantees
There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.Collection: Sadness
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.Collection: Goes On
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.Collection: Mean
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.Collection: Thinking
Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.Collection: Real
I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.Collection: Inspirational
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.Collection: Reality
You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.Collection: Running
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.Collection: Lonely
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water." "This is water." It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.Collection: Real
It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.Collection: Anxiety
Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons.Collection: Lonely
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.Collection: Moving
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.Collection: People
In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.Collection: Home
You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.Collection: Loneliness
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.Collection: Enjoy
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.Collection: Thinking