All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell.
He found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?””Redemption,” Shane says.
But it’s not easy, realising how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realisation that the edge is so close to where we live.
Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.
Among the world’s evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid’s school.
It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.
He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.
Always speak first to the toughest person in the room.
The movie I was working on, “Cleopatra”, it’s about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that’s what every story is about.
He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.
Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.
And while his mother’s lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant–how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.
I guess I forgot we were going out tonight.””We always go out on Fridays.””It’s Thursday, Alvis.””You are so tied to routine.
Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.
Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.