Little Monsters

To be so young as to have no idea of your insignificance.

But make no mistake, the admissions of his shortcomings weren’t an apology. Rather, they seemed to raise his stature: a genius who recognized his deficiencies. Somehow, by acknowledging his mistakes, Adam moved them to the credit side of the ledger.

August was the Sunday of summer,

This was the ultimate paradox of being human: the longing for vitality in a world ruled by decay.

People got depression all wrong. It had nothing to do with feeling sad, and everything to do with feeling nothing. And “depression” just might be the most inadequate word in the English language. How could a word used to describe a sunken hollow on a pillow also encompass this? This soul-destroying state deserved its own word.

The expert cited a Mandarin word, yu yi, which he defined as “the longing to feel intensely again, as you did when you were a child.

But once scientists were tasked with making money, it was a slippery slope; lines blurred. Churning out papers and applying for grants were activities that fed on themselves, a serpent eating its own tail.

What mattered now was productivity, the efficient use of time, and how to quantify those things, which as far as Adam could tell came down to citation tracking, the scientific equivalent of being popular. Good riddance, lemmings! What had happened to scientific observation, serious contemplation, and the meticulous construction of theories?

Their family was a conspiracy of silence, and anyone who broke the silence should not expect to be forgiven.

One of the best things about pregnancy was that you felt less deranged talking to yourself—there was always someone else in the room.

I think you’re wrong, Ken. I think if you don’t remove your mask soon, it will fuse to your face, and you’ll never be able to feel deeply. Not only pain but also joy.

Hiding your feelings doesn’t signify a mastery of them.

But the question you must ask yourself is: How well is your mask working for you now? Protection can exact a steep price.

You had to project an image of strength while everything that made you feel safe and secure vanished.

Steinbeck called rejection the hell of fears.” George closed his eyes and recited: “ ‘And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.’ If you haven’t read East of Eden recently, I think it might resonate.

The flip side of which is grandiosity,” George continued. “Contempt turned outward.

Define shame.” “Contempt turned inward,” George said, “and the hallmark of a certain toxic masculinity.

For men, shame is the invisible twin to childhood trauma. It’s deeply rooted in the male psyche, part of the legacy of the patriarchy, and, from everything you’ve told me, embedded in your family’s pathology. A pathology, I might add, that has likely rolled from generation to generation,” George said. “So, let’s start there. Are you going to be the guy with the courage to stop the pattern and spare your children? Or the guy who sleepwalks through life and repeats his ancestors’ mistakes?

She wasn’t sure why she was keeping secrets, except for an underlying feeling that her success might derail the men in her life, who were accustomed to getting the lion’s share of attention. The last thing she needed right now was to have to manage their egos.

the goal of capturing the kinetic energy of change itself.

It was the first day of April 2016, and the world was a white-hot mess. Adam was willing to put money down that soon the presidential choice would be between a boorish billionaire and an unscrupulous woman.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Like everyone else, she got only one life. The one she was living right now. This life that could only have happened with every experience she'd ever had - that had landed her here, in this perfect moment.

No matter the season, the sight of the dunes rolling into the ocean always awakened Abby's senses and filled her with awe for the cycle of life. She thought of how the horseshoe crabs emerged from Cape Cod Bay each spring to mate and deposit their eggs; how juvenile sea turtles knew to travel to these waters where crabs and jellyfish were plentiful; how monarch butterflies - each of which lived up to only six weeks - managed to transfer knowledge intergenerationally to complete their year-long migration to and from Mexico.

To stare into the spiral of a shell was to see the swirl of a galaxy, the logarithmic spiral of life itself, the intertwined miracle of art and science.

If only they could float up here with her and see the world as she was seeing it. Then they'd realize how small a sliver of the universe they occupied.

The sun threw its last javelins of gold and the sky passed through violet to become a deep indigo.

Our scars are what make us unique. Nothing broken is ever lost.

Whenever I paint the truth, no matter how strange, people see themselves in it.