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1





No matter how fast you travel, life walks.

2





Desire's most seductive promise is not pleasure but change, not that you might possess your object but that you might become the one who belongs with it.

3





There are silences harder to take back than words.

4





Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.

5





If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

6





Wind cannot blow the wind away, nor water wash away the water.

7





Our lives get complicated because complexity is so much simpler than simplicity.

8





Everyone loves the Revolution. We only disagree on whether it has occurred.

9





Pain is not a democracy.

10





Once it's gone, how easy to say it was mine.

11





The world is not what anyone wished for, but it's what everyone wished for.

12





The great liars are credulous; they have convinced themselves first of all.

13





Like late afternoon, a pale cirrus crosses the nearly transparent moon. They are so alike, meeting, that I feel, suddenly and childishly, They like each other. Somehow I can't help liking them for that. Somehow I can't help feeling that they like me liking them.

14





My weaknesses are less remarkable than all the things I have at one time or another imagined were my strengths.

15





Stand watch over your peace and you will be peaceless.

16





What I'm not changes more than what I am.

17





So many times I've made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.

18





The wound hurts less than your desire to wound me.

19





Think of all the smart people who are made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn't fine long when used as a hammer.

20





To lose weight or regain patience, learn to love the sour, the bitter, the salty, the clear.

21





Birds are amazing, newspapers, stoves, friends. All that happens is amazing, if you think about it. All that doesn't happen is even more amazing, because there's so much more of it. Only habit keeps us from seeing all this. Habit is really amazing.

22





Only eternity needs eternity. But without the year, no growth; without the hour, no love; without the second, no grace, no thought.

23





If you say All is well, I believe you. If I say All is well, I'm abbreviating.

24





Often my child asks for something utterly trivial not because she cares for it but because she needs to hear me say Yes, yes.

25





Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it's more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can't tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you've already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.

26





Happiness is a sad study.

27





The mistakes I made from weakness do not embarrass me nearly so much as those I made insisting on my strength.

28





Throw it away. But there is no away.

29





My troubles are tedious even to me. I told them only so I wouldn't be wanting to tell them.

30





Go outside? At least here I know what I am inside.

31





It's amazing that I sit at my job all day, and no one sees me clearly enough to say "What is that boy doing behind a desk?"

32





All but the most durable books serve us by simply opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and wonder how we could have loved them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.

33





Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.

34





I seem to need a larger vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.

35





That gentle, harmless drug that would make me permanently happier? I would refuse it. After all, I can't tell myself from my limits. It would be like dying for a great cause: nothing of me would be left to know what I'd done. And I am no hero.

36





No matter how much time I save, I have only now.

37





You would think we would envy only what we love, for being loveable. But no, we envy those the world loves, because we care less for being loveable than being loved.

38





Why would we write if we'd already heard what we wanted to hear?

39





Your hatred is a night bombardment, lighting places of myself I never see. But even in the pain of admitting my selfishness there is curiosity and relief. To be a character, at last, and a rather ordinary one, from whom I realistically shouldn't expect too much!

40





A faith is dead when no one can think of a heresy.

41





If god had been more easily bored, we would look less like each other, more like oceans, contraptions, birds, gods.

42





The best time is stolen time.

43





Telling your troubles will be a relief only if shame is one of them. But even in what seem the most selfless griefs, there it is.

44





The mercy of a stone is in asking no mercy.

45





Some things need to be fixed, others to be left broken.

46





I need to blame pain. If you did nothing to deserve it, there is no way I can avoid it. And if I'm the one in pain, it's better to blame myself than doubt I can escape by doing something right.

47





That we're here seems a wonder; on the other hand, who would be wondering if we weren't?

48





If they say it's unique they want you to buy. If you think I'm unique you're trying to sell.

49





Truth is like the flu. I fight it off, but it changes in other bodies and returns in a form to which I am not immune.

50





Despair says It's all the same. Happiness knows there are even a thousand Despairs.

51





More dangerous than the worst is the pretty good you can no longer tell from the best.

52





When we hate everything what we really hate is not knowing what we really like.

53





This sentence is headed into the future, and past it, into the past.

54





Finally I get drunk enough to forget I'm not a poet. Which makes me too happy to write a word.

55





Happiness is gratitude in search of something to be owed to.

56





What happened to the years? How did I get this way? By being this way.