ed

I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.

The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych’s greatest pleasure was playing bridge.

Debt robs a man of his self-respect, and makes him almost despise himself.

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.

The day you went away I knew I would never see you again. You were

stained red by the late afternoon sun, by the dusk filling the sky with blood.

His heart had been broken. And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.