March 2009
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
—Plato
“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to move on when the one you love walks away from you. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
— Neil Gaiman
“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
—Charles Bukowski
“Basically it would just be neat to be in a relationship with someone who is as intensely crazy as I am. Who just becomes enamored with people. And the tiny details. I swoon over people in the most ridiculous way. I like all of the tiny details of people. When I am an ass over someone, I want to go back in time and punch people in the face for them. I want to run out to the store and get them ice cream at four in the morning because they can’t go to sleep and they feel like something rich. And when I get back to your place with a half gallon of ice cream and your ass is passed out with your mouth open, catching flies, I want to cover you up with blankets and make sure you have enough pillows. I’ll throw that ice cream in your freezer and go to sleep. I want you to tell me a story. I want to make this list of why I think you’re a neat human being.”
— Jenni Crowley’s thoughts on love
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
—Anais Nin
“If homosexuality is a disease, let’s all call in queer to work: “Hello. Can’t work today, still queer.”
—-Seth Rogen
“You did it. You acknowledged the elephant in the room. You said what needed to be said and frankly, I’m proud of you! Now what? Well, I suppose we find a way to deal with the elephant. What were the reactions or non-reactions when you spoke the truth? Is this (A) something worth fighting for or did you (B) just want to clear the air? If the answer is A, awesome- keep fighting, I’m behind you 100%. If it’s B, then your work is done and now you can think about something else, like how unbelievably brave you are.
Today remind yourself: I speak the truth.” —
Today remind yourself: I speak the truth.” —
“It turned out he wasn’t in love with me like I thought. What I’m trying to say is, I understand feeling as small and insignificant as humanly possible and how it can ache in places you didn’t know you had inside you. And it doesn’t matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join or glasses of champagne you drink with your girlfriends, you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong, or how you could’ve misunderstood and how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he’ll see the light and show up at your door and after all that however long all that may be, you’ll go somewhere new and you’ll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again and it’ll be as though your soul will finally come back and all that fuzzy stuff, those years of your life that you wasted will eventually begin to fade.”
—
“You know those terrible stories about dolphins getting tangled in tuna nets or turtles getting their heads stuck in those plastic soda rings? That can happen to us too (not the soda rings of course, our heads are too big), but, metaphorically, we can get wrapped up in other people’s garbage or trapped by a net that we have no business being in. Thank God we’re not marine life. We have the choice to cut free.
Today remind yourself: Untangle.” —
Today remind yourself: Untangle.” —
I dug this up randomly just now and yep, still hilarious
Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country.
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
“
1. I miss being the girl that kept you on the phone till unreasonable hours. I miss talking to you about wildly inappropriate things. I miss knowing more about you than I really wanted to and certainly more than anyone else did
2. Would you recognize me if I walked into your store? Even people I see every day say that they have to do a double-take to make sure it’s me. You could tell who I was from across the parking lot, looking at my back. Could you still?
3. There isn’t anyone else that I can talk to the way I could talk to you.
4. I don’t know what I am doing now that you’re not a part of my life.
” —
# Take a 10-30 minutes walk every day. And while you walk, smile. # Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day. # Sleep for 7 hours # Live with the 3 E’s — Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy. # Play more games. # Read more books than you did the previous year. # Make time to practice meditation, yoga, and prayer. They provide us with daily fuel for our busy lives. # Spend time with people over the age of 70 & under the age of 6. # Dream more while you are awake. # Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants. # Drink plenty of water. # Try to make at least three people smile each day. # Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip. # Forget issues of the past. Don’t remind your partner with his/her mistakes of the past. That will ruin your present happiness. # Don’t have negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment. # Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime. # Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar. # Smile and laugh more. # Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Don’t hate others. # Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does. # You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree. # Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present. # Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about. Don’t compare your partner with others. # No one is in charge of your happiness except you. # Forgive everyone for everything. # What other people think of you is none of your business. # However good or bad a situation is, it will change. # Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch. # Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful. (I’m trying really hard to do this.) # Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need. # The best is yet to come. # No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up. # Do the right thing! # Call your family often. # Your inner most is always happy. So be happy. # Each day give something good to others. # Don’t over do. Keep your limits.”
“You grew up with comforts, without danger, and now you have to seek it out, manufacture it, or, worse, use the misfortunes of friends and acquaintances to add drama to your own life.”
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
“Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out. You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.”
—
“A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you’ll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don’t. You can’t. Somehow it’s already too late. And maybe it’s even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you’ve feared will happen has already taken place…and in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it.”
— Richard Ford
“I don’t want to be somebody’s crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don’t want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it, too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me. And if they do something I don’t like, I”ll tell them.”
— The Perks of Being a Wallflower
