If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can’t afford to be with them. It’s not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you’re lucky it’s reasonable. You have a sense of when you’re about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one’s that busy at work. No one’s allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden. But most people don’t get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you’ll figure out if it’s worth it later.

m

My only purpose in life is to teach her how to make it.

Wink

m

Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.

To the latecomers are left the bones.

m

i miss california

m

She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.

m

more laughs here

m

my head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but i swung from this dark mood to euphoria when i thought about leaving.  eggers

can’t wait to go HOME

m

So much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.

What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone woud catch them — you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words.

He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.

To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step farther, this is the shortstop’s dream.

chad harbach

m

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.

My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.

yann martel

m