This is one reason people need to believe in God—because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.
Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.
I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.
Biblical, Talmudic, or Koranic literalists remind me of children wrinkling their noses at Belon oysters and asking for more Chef Boy-E-Dee. They want the world to be as simple as they are.
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.
People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist more fiercely within themselves.
Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.
If you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone.
One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.
What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.
I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.
The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts.
The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing.
Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people – if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are – you may have lost perspective.
The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play.
It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing.
It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it’s something we collectively force one another to do.