Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.
I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.
Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.
Words never mean what we want them to mean.
Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.
I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
I was more alone than if I had been alone.
It's a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.
She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.
Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.
Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.
For how long could we fail until we surrendered?
I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.
Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.
The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame.
You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.
Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.
I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.
I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.
I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.
It's hard to say goodbye to the place you've lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.
She said I could have a seat on the couch if I wanted to, but I told her I didn't believe in leather, so I stood.
Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destryo each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.
Years were passing through the spaces between moments.
From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.
I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.
One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.
The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
Every moment before this one depends on this one.
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or something worse?
I wasn't trying to invent better and better homes, but to show her that homes didn't matter, we could live in any home, in any city, in any country, in any century, and be happy, as if the world were just what we lived in.
Its so painful to think, and tell me what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever get me?
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.
You could bury people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.
Grandfather kicked the stop pedal, and my face gave a high-five to the front window.
I will describe my eyes and then begin the story. My eyes are blue and resplendent. Now I will begin the story.
Or how he was once found on the well regarded Rabbi's front lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum heel, and used his body to remember his body, but in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?
The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.
Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?
I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?
I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say...
I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.
I've thought myself out of happinessone one million times, but never once into it.
She wrote, I wish I could be a girl again, with a chance to live my life again. I have suffered so much more than I needed to. And the joys I have felt have not always been joyous. I could have lived differently.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories