Critical thinking is important; so is kindness.
People are entitled to their happiness, even when it's on our behalf.
Old sad songs that are new to me have a way of stirring long-dormant hurts.
There is a kind of intelligence that seeks footholds in other people's ignorance, that finds leverage in asymmetry and disequilibrium. The exerciser of such an intelligence often relies on the obliviousness of those closest to him to furnish his schemes, viewing their complacence as a form of acquiescence; but what intelligent, manipulative people seldom realize, for all their sophistication, is that it isn't always the absence of guile or worldliness that affords their movements trespass without notice; in truth, they have been observed and recognized: it is merely that they are also loved—and for all the things that love gets hung up on and obsesses over, there is also so much more that love accommodates and overlooks and even forgives. Sometimes we get away with things because we have willing, adoring accomplices.
You can't choose who you love but you can pick your battles.
One way to avoid forming a meaningful opinion about something is to avoid the thing itself.
There's a difference between trying hard and working hard.
Nostalgia is nostalgia up to a point. After that point it becomes a fetish. (After that point it becomes morbid.)
It's one thing to be a creature of habit. It's another to be a creature of possibility.
You put your heart in. You don't always get your heart out.
Sometimes friends remember us when we don't even remember ourselves.
Trying not to care about something that's bothering you is like trying not to taste what's already in your mouth.
I think a not inconsiderable number of our internal conflicts may be attributed to the fact that what makes us sad doesn't necessarily also make us unhappy.
Closeness is a privilege, not a liberty.
We scale mountains. We plumb oceans. We create scenes.
I don't know about "always keep them guessing." I prefer "always keep them discovering."
The afternoon sun hitting the television so hard that I can barely make out what's onscreen is the world's welcome reminder that I should be outside.
Few things lull me into a trance like air-conditioning in February.
I know when I'm circling a truth because my breathing becomes shallow.
It's not real just because you've given it a name. It's real when it does what its name says.
We are the evidence of what we are.
It's one of those neutrally buoyant Los Angeles afternoons where the air is the temperature of my thoughts and I'm not sure if the world's the dream or I'm the dream.
Everything ends eventually out of necessity. A practical mind is the death of immortality.
I'll remain your mystery if you'll remain mine.
We spend our lives waiting for other shoes to drop. There's no umbrella for that.
It's careless where we leave our hearts. It's also the most caring thing in the world.
The fun thing about trouble is that there are always new kinds to get into.
We celebrate the moment: hold it down, breathe memory into its mouth. We exhale constellations of vapor, watering each other with our words. Sentiment freezes into comets, orbits, stars. Festivity is a holding pattern; the universe is limitless intent.
Respectful-awkward is always preferable to resentful-awkward.
If you don't feel like playing the game now, you can always play it later. The game never ends.
"Well, if you are what you love, and you do what you love, I will always be the sun and moon to you. And if you share with your heart—yeah, you give with your heart—what you share with the world is what it keeps of you."
"Give a Little Love," Noah and the Whale.
Sometimes I linger because I wonder.
You hide things from the world. It takes sound a while to carry. I hope the light will be enough. Things will never be this way again.
We've sung this song, we've danced this dance—every conceivable configuration of what we are, we've been.
Waking up in strange places is the most potent form of time travel.
If there's poetry in wakefulness on temperate nights, I haven't found it yet. Disordered sleep is a delicate thing: It must be handled with care and packed in snow.
Some correspondences are so effortless I don't think they're real.
Perhaps ironically, or perversely, the global economy's present manic panic is precisely the sort of instability I assumed would set the tone for this emerging century back in 2000. It's disorder and uncertainty, yes, but it's also numbers and politics. It's business as usual, albeit less usual.
A day in September of the following year seemed to set us on a different, regressive course—an itinerary hatched by anarchists bent on reducing everyone and everything to sticks and stones, underscored by the drumbeat of subsequent wars.
I'd rather see customers run on banks than children running from tanks. I'd rather see golden-parachuted CEOs receive their walking papers than ill-equipped ill-prepared soldiers receive their marching orders. Financial losses don't hold a candle in a hurricane to the ineluctable loss of human lives.
Paper beats rock any day, in any age.
I've been going to bed somewhat content lately. I don't know how I feel about that.
I've observed that insulting someone's intelligence in order to spare their feelings is literally neither hither nor thither.
You cut your hair, the delivery guy observed. Preparing for the Republicans, I snarked lazily. You think they're gonna pull it off? he asked. At this point I hope not, is all I could offer.
Hoping for something not to happen tends to be the opposite of being hopeful.
When it was just us, it was simple. Do people mean it when they say they don't remember? I mean it when I say I haven't forgotten.
Oh, look: there you are; and there you are; but it's not the same.