If It Bleeds

Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.

Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.

The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.

...I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.

Youth is a wonderful thing,” said Mr. Harrigan. “What a shame it’s wasted on children.

The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.

And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?

Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.

My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice.

I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?

The Life of Chuck: I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.

I am large, I contain multitudes’?

Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it.

Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.

Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.

Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.

Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place.

Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free.

I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made.

I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.

You can’t have everything, she thinks; into every life a little poop must fall. But sometimes you do get what you need. Which is really all a sane person can ask for.

Nothing was eternal, except maybe for the mind of God, and even at thirteen I had my doubts about that.

But fascination is fear’s twin brother,

It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.

The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.

It’s a Wonderful Life has always made her uneasy. She can relate to George Bailey at the beginning of the film, but by the end he strikes her as someone with a serious bipolar condition who’s arrived at the manic part of his cycle. She has even wondered if, after the movie ends, he creeps out of bed and murders his whole family.

As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns.