300 Arguments: Essays

The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember.

The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.

You'll never know what your mother went through.

Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.

The trouble with comparing yourself to others is that there are too many others. Using all others as your control group, all your worst fears and all your fondest hopes are at once true. You are good; you are bad; you are abnormal; you are just like everyone else.

Only a fire can teach you what survives a fire. No, it teaches you what can survive that fire.

Some people will punish you merely for witnessing their weakness. Even if they sought you out and asked for help. Even if you helped. Especially if you helped.

Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things.

I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.

Biographies should also contain the events that failed to foreshadow.

The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you'll finish in time to send a new version by morning.

Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough.

Whatever you're feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.

We like stories that are false and seem true (realist novels), that are true and seem false (true crime), that are false and seem false (dragons and superheroes), or that are true and seem true, but it's harder to agree on what that is.

Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.

I'd never have guessed which people I'd still know by now.

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages.

I've written whole books in order to avoid writing other books.

It isn't so much that geniuses make it look easy; it's that they make it look it fast.

You aren't the same person after a good night's sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?

There truly are two kinds of people: you and everyone else.

Outsiders pretend to be insiders, and it makes them unlikable. Insiders pretend to be outsiders, and we love to play along.

Failure is good preparation for success, which comes as a pleasant surprise, but success is poor preparation for failure.

Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named.

There will come a time when people decide you've had enough of your grief, and they'll try to take it away from you.

I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I'll escape the worst of it.

Who seems a harmless fool to those above him is a malevolence to those beneath.

I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are.