Home > Work > What Comes Next and How to Like It
1 " It ended sadly. The kind of ending where you wait together, holding hands and weeping, while off in another room, love slowly dies. "
― , What Comes Next and How to Like It
2 " After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections. "
3 " Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life. "
4 " He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend. "
5 " Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world. "
6 " Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful. "
7 " Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love me exactly, but they count on me because I am a source of heat and food and pleasure and affection. "
8 " Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn’t work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; "
9 " But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow. "
10 " Anger is a luxury. Anger wants answers, retribution, reason, something that makes sense. Anger wants a story, stories help us make sense out of everything. But while we scramble to help those who need it, who has time for anger? Who has time to make sense out of anything? There is only what is. Anger is a distraction. Anger removes me from grief, and the opportunity to be helpful. "
11 " This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections. "
12 " What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries. "
13 " I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think. "
14 " Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love me exactly, but they count on me because I am a source of heat and food and pleasure and affection. If one of them is lying next to me and suddenly prefers the sofa, I don’t take it personally. Dogs don’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. There is no wrong side of the bed for a dog. "
15 " The connection with him is a connection with part of myself, and it has to do with a kind of insatiable curiosity. I mean the part of me that gets connected to the rest of me when I’m connecting to him. The insatiably curious part. "
16 " Love Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn’t ask for, didn’t want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic. And the dog comes back. "
17 " somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn’t much I’d rather say than think. Of course for more than thirty years I’ve had Chuck. We’ve known each other so long that we don’t have to talk, and when we do we don’t have to say anything. When he asks me if I’d like to take a trip around the world I can say yes knowing I’ll never have to go. "
18 " I have decided that when I’m dead I’d like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his remains. “Remains?” says Chuck. “Do there have to be remains? Can’t I just vanish? Be no more?” I tell him I’m sorry but yes, he has to have remains. “Either I’m too young to be thinking about this,” he says, “or I have to figure out a way of offing myself that will leave no remains. I could get in the shower with a chain saw, "
19 " I used to lie in a lover's arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn't comfortable in his embrace...Would Snow White have rested all eight pounds of her head on any part of the prince? I doubt it, and I never did either. Sarah says that is why elderly women have such prominent cords in their necks. "
20 " There are three things that make me want to drink: difficult times, when I want alcohol to either alleviate the pain or allow me to feel it; clear days that make me want to scribble all over the irritating blue sky; and well, waking up in the morning. "