Research now shows that sustaining even a tiny white lie requires quite a bit of bandwidth, and people falter if they are tired or multitasking. Intuiting this, and lazy by nature, I vowed in my teens that I would find gentle ways to tell the truth.
Appreciation warms us. It is a gentle form of enthusiasm, which in the original Greek meant to be inspired by—even possessed by—a god. To have the divine inside you, glowing through the folds of viscera.
Paul Guyot decided he would write his own damned book. But first he would have to read all those books he thought absurd.
Nette wrapped each scarf in tissue, tied it with a bow, and added a note with washing instructions. I doled out these packages with diffidence; they offered nothing cool, trendy, or stylish.
Hiking feels as sacred as church, carrying me into a pristine wilderness. But it also requires me to do what I am terrible at: pay attention to the physical, sensory, concrete world around me.
His talk won the kind of sustained applause that brings soloists back for an encore. In his version, this meant Q&A. How, as a nation, can we get past all this pain?
Waldo accrued rather a lot of wisdom in his travels. His books teach us to pay attention, if we want to spot the hidden details of the universe.
Some griefs, like my overreaction to “Lessons in Chemistry,” overlap with our own past hurts.
These are tiny disturbances of the domestic sphere, brief incursions of chaos. They remind me of the finite limits of our budget, my patience, and my life span.
“The U.S. Constitution was derived from the Iroquois [Haudenosaunee] Confederacy,” he points out, and surreptitiously, I jot a note. How did I not know that?
Nothing is new, shocking, revelatory. All the lumps and bumps, moles and birthmarks, scars and stretch marks are on display, and the need to conceal your own drops away. Nakedness, done right, has no ego.
The success of Hoover’s books reminds me how prissy and bourgeois I am. Hoover’s fans say her work leaves them speechless, in tears, happy wrecks.