Bruckle Things

"Love is certainly never safe, but it's absolutely worth it."

“They [olympic athletes] remind us that we are all connected. That our strength comes from how we treat each other, and that the best of humanity is found in courage, compassion, and kindness.”

"That is petty, but not improper."

"I clutch the brimming warmth of her thigh and think about the fact that -- even at its most hopeful -- my measly brain could never have dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her."

"It is our life's work to mistrust our measures, especially those about moral and mental standing. ... To remember that a category is at best a proxy, at worst, a shackle."

"Scientists have discovered, it's true, that employing positive allusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside the tunnel vision of your goals."

"How my oldest sister will, in an act so emblematic of her -- her caring, her conscientiousness, her hyper-punctuality -- write and mail my father a condolence card that arrives somehow a day early. How the next day, a few minutes after his mother dies, he will think of my sister's card and he will laugh; the first rupture of warmth on that bleakest of days."

"The best way of ensuring that you don't miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit with every breath that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of chaos with curiosity, with doubt."

"Life, the flipside of death; growth, of rot."

"I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them, not because I worked for them, but because they are as much a part of chaos as destruction, and loss."

"What other truths are waiting behind the lines we draw over nature? ... The longer we examine our world, the stranger it proves to be."

"Snorkel is best invention. God bless snorkel inventor. It win peace prize?"

"There is another world, but it is in this one."

"From the perspective of the stars, or infinity... sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that one person could be so much more. A stand in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving ones darkest years."

"In other words, a rosy view of yourself was anathema to self development. A way to keep yourself stagnant, stunted, morally inchoate. A fast track to sad sackery."

"You don't matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite, so live as you please. ... He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don't matter either, treat them like they do. He has made my mom coffee almost every day for half a century. He is devoted to his students: they came to our holiday meals, they sometimes lived in our home. ... What could be a grim reality has instead pumped his life full of vigor, has made him live big and good. I have strived my whole life to follow in his nihilistic clown-shoed footsteps; to stare our pointlessness in the face and waddle along toward happiness because of it."