“Mr. Palmer had a gentle curiosity that worked like sunlight on me; he asked questions and, beguilingly, listened to the answers. How rare is the man who does that. Perhaps it was a sign of my advancing years that I found such kindness attractive.”

“If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains! […] …but it requires a great deal of discipline and a degree of puritanical cold-heartedness to live in that way.”

“Some of the most interesting writers could pass as bank managers, I said, while the wittiest raconteur could become dull once he had recognized the necessity of explaining his anecdotes piece by piece. Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.”

I figured out what one of my issues is with my new work structure.

“Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.”

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

I think often about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its own form of “research,” and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy. What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time? What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return—and more time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended?

Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.

I’ve already written that the “doing nothing” I propose is more than a weekend retreat. But that doesn’t mean I propose a permanent retreat either. Understanding the impossibility of a once-and-for-all exit—for most of us, anyway—sets the stage for a different kind of retreat, or refusal-in-place […]. Here’s what I want to escape. To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. […] In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. […] In such a context, the need to periodically step away is more obvious than ever. Like the managerial employees who wandered away from their jobs, we absolutely require distance and time to be able to see the mechanisms we thoughtlessly submit to. More than that, as I’ve argued thus far, we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all.

He was basically a Care Bear trapped in the body of an underwear model. I was confused by him for months. Why was he so bad at flirting? Why did he do the things he said he was going to? Why was he so damn happy all the time? What was I missing?

How can we encourage you enough that you will keep quoting from the books you read. Miss your more frequent postings but understand your world today needs more privacy...... Miss YOU.

“For me, the practice of putting pen to paper creates an alchemy hard to duplicate any other way.”

That is exactly the kind of Best Lawyer content I come here for. You know how to keep us on the edge of our seats!