We Are Not Ourselves

You are not in this life to count up victories and defeats. You are in it to love and be loved.

Sometimes, she thought, life makes you grow up early. And some people never grow up at all.

So much of life was the peeling away of illusions.

When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don't know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

There were places, she now saw, that contained more happiness than ordinary places did. Unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were.

Life is going to give you things to be angry at. I don’t want you to be consumed by that anger or forget how much you’re capable of.

She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.

When I am gone, I want you to hear my voice in your head. Hear it when you most need to, when you feel most hopeless, when you feel most alone. When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don’t know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

Then he quoted from a French Jesuit named Teilhard de Chardin: “He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

The point wasn’t always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well.

He wanted, one day, to be a person who went out of his way to find out what made other people happy.

Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve.

We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body. —King Lear

She wondered if she'd taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it.

This was life; you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn't a love story?

Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.

It was time now to be smart–smart and strong. She wondered whether she'd ever have a chance to be foolish and weak.

Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn't to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.

The little sedimentary deposits of his need had piled at her feet until they blocked her view of him.

Don’t ever love anyone,” her mother said, picking the papers up and sliding them into the bureau drawer she’d kept her ring in. “All you’ll do is break your own heart.

Negative thoughts back you into a corner. They multiply and surround you. Don't think of what you don't have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.

For now, while he breathed and moved, while he felt and thought, there was still, between this moment and the one of his dying, the interval allotted to him, and there was so much to live for in it . . .

He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He'd been a stranger in the world for most of his life.

The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasn’t enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She

The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.

When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren’t they always a little absurd? They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He’ll be in good hands.

A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life.

The kids who thought of snappy things on the spot never had to worry about being fat or smart or pussies. You had to have a little meanness in you to do it. You had to be willing to embarrass other people sometimes.