Author: admin

Of course her best friends were all gay men. They were always saying funny things like: “They should never have hired Sienna Miller to play Edie Sedgewick – Lady Gaga is already playing Edie Sedgewick for free.”

At least, if I were going to be an asshole, I should have been an eloquent one. Nothing’s more pathetic than a bumbling asshole further frustrated and agitated by just how inarticulate they are.

The doctor diagnosed him as being anxious about anxiety. “If there’s nothing to worry about,” she said, “you’ll worry about what to worry about, or wonder what it is you should be worrying about so you don’t get the rug pulled out from under you later.”

These two things are at war: the desire to be settled, established, accomplished in life, the satisfaction of having realized one’s potential in life and then the fear of being trapped, having squandered that potential, or at least simple disgust at the structuring of life that you could only realize one of your potential selves; and then people make you feel so small because they think that’s who you are, your identity, when really you know you could’ve been so many things. You make possibility reality, and there’s comfort in that; but there’s also a sense of loss: what was dynamic has, in a way, become static.

She had a tendency to learn about problems she couldn’t solve and stress herself out over them, and so she decided it was best to take on a job she didn’t really care about in order to decompress for awhile. The result was that she still got stressed—only now it was about things that were completely meaningless and absurd.

The book was a love story that made her cry and feel more than any other book had made her feel in a long time. She was a little startled by the realization that if anyone had ever loved her with the kind of overwhelming love described in the book, it was no man, but her mother.

He asked if he had done something to offend her. Without batting an eyelash, she answered: “Give me a timeframe.”

Sometimes, with a warm kind of gratitude to no one and nothing in particular, I think to myself, “This is so comfortable!” But then I am haunted by the momentary afterthought that the comfort of this, for me, cannot last.

She said she was only interested in reciprocity, and he asked her to define the term. She answered without hesitation: “The price of my surrender is yours.”

Two of the art professors were married and could each (but never both of them together) be found at all hours of the day and night working in the studio on their own projects. The students could never decide if their marriage was really enviable, really unhealthy, or perhaps both.

Sometime in elementary school, as she was walking up a short flight of stairs, she realized that even if she began in that moment, she could not finish reading all of the books in existence before she died; and so she would have to make choices. And although it seemed, in a way, pointless to possess only in part what she had childishly, unthinkingly assumed would be hers in full, she carried on.

He could never forgive her. He could get past neither the Nothing she did nor the Everything she thought.

He was forever being seduced by younger girls who didn’t know what they wanted. He felt like wearing a badge that said, “It’s fine if you’re immature and confused, just don’t drag me into it—keep your hands to yourself.”

She had never intended to crawl or to substitute cheap, embarrassing romances for something worthy of her own sense of integrity. But as time passed, the waiting became increasingly difficult.

He sometimes contemplated actually fixing the problems that plagued him. But then what would he complain about?

The compliments she received in her childhood actually hurt her much more than the insults. They established a certain set of characteristics she felt compelled to cling to for the rest of her life in order to ensure she would always be liked.

At first he was infuriated by his sickness, but eventually he came to regard it as an invaluable lesson that despite your best efforts, sometimes you simply cannot guarantee your own safety. He stopped hating himself.

We set out on an epic journey. Within the first twenty-four hours, we missed our connecting flight, got accused by the Portuguese police of breaking and entering, and slept with one eye open in an apartment crawling with spiders; and still we were undeterred.