Sketchbook

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

“I feel like, especially as celebrities, we have to talk through this filter of professionalism and emotional intelligence,” he says. “Sometimes you just need to be mad. You need to lay down what it is that’s on your mind. Sometimes you don’t have enough time to play the game.”

Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one’s self and one’s mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one’s self and status.

Never allow despair to have the last word.

You've got to shatter the superficial to get at the substantial. You're going to need money. You're going to need a career. You're going to need education. But do not view those things as idols. You use those things for something bigger than [your]selves. Love. Justice. Integrity. And so on. But it's easy to get caught...[D]on't confuse service and status. Once you get the status, then you start serving. What are you going to do with it?

If you say that you are angry, it is understood as an emotion,” he said. “If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.

Over the years she had bought very few things for herself, being naturally frugal and imagining, always, that her real life would happen elsewhere. The plaid sofa, the matching chair—she liked this furniture well enough, she had chosen it herself, but she saw now that she could easily leave it. Leave all of it, she supposed, looking around at the framed prints of landscapes, the wicker magazine rack by the sofa, the low coffee table. Her own apartment seemed suddenly no more personal than a waiting room in any clinic in town. And what else, after all, had she been doing here all these years but waiting?

Books are not to be isolated or condemned to loneliness; they are never happier than when housed with carefully chosen members of their families.

When publishing “Feminist discussions before cooking potatoes” in 2011, Ekhtesari removed certain words from her book to avoid censorship by the Iranian authorities. After printing, she filled the missing words in by hand.

Love is never any better than the lover.

Women’s time has been interrupted and fragmented throughout history, the rhythms of their days circumscribed by the sisyphean tasks of housework, childcare and kin work – keeping family and community ties strong. If what it takes to create are long stretches of uninterrupted, concentrated time, time you can choose to do with as you will, time that you can control, that’s something women have never had the luxury to expect, at least not without getting slammed for unseemly selfishness.

He was full of tenderness; She was very hard. And as much as she tried to stay thus, Simply, and with no good reason, He took her into himself, And set her down In the softest, softest place

I remember having this talk with my mother, because I didn't even know what love meant,” Henry begins. Henry's parents were separated for most of his life, and he lived with both of them at times. His mother was unlucky in love, and one day Henry asked her why she was with the person she was with. “I wanted to know why she was with this dude, because we saw how he treated my mother. I was like, ‘Look…do you love him?’ ” Here Henry laughs, a bit sadly. “And she would always be like, ‘What's love got to do with it?’ And I was like, ‘Slow down. You are not Tina Turner. You have to love this person, right? Because if you don't love this person, why are you wasting your time?’ So I was like, ‘Well, I'm the only man you made. Crafted me in your image, basically. And I can never leave you. No matter where I go, there you are. So if you don't love this man, leave him, for real. If he doesn't kiss the back of your neck when you're scrambling eggs, leave him. If you're out here raking his fucking acres of yard and he doesn't take the rake out of your hands, fucking leave him. 'Cause he'll never be better than me.’ “So the biggest thing was that when Atlanta wrapped, I was gonna take my mom on what I was calling the dick tour. Because I was going to go get my mom laid. I was like, ‘Mom, you ain't never been with a white dude? Wait, Ma, you ain't never been with a doctor? Wait, what if this white dude has, like, a helicopter?’ I know it sounds skeezy, but she had been on this planet for 68 years and had never experienced a man wanting her or seeing her the way she deserved. And God damn it, I've seen her tie cherry stems with her tongue. That's how fucking dope my mom was. I wanted to be the man that showed her that she could obtain anything. Anything. Because what's that life? Oh, you married this person, so you gotta spend every day unhappy next to this motherfucker? Like, no. And right as I had the car rented, she was gone.

Jewish tradition states that one is considered a mourner when one of eight people dies: father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife, son, or daughter. This definition doesn’t fulfill the needs of today’s diverse and far-flung affections; indeed, it probably never did. It leaves out the step-relations, the long-term lovers, the chosen family of a tight circle of friends; and it includes the blood relations we perhaps never honestly loved. But its intentions are true. And, undeniably, for most of us that list of eight does come awfully close. We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”