100種生活

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"I didn’t ask permission to make this language mine. I stole it, like I used to steal apples and corn from my childhood gardens. I took large bites out of hard words, to make them mine. My grief and my anger turned Eastern Europe into a voodoo doll."

"I firmly believe in small gestures: pay for their coffee, hold the door for strangers, over tip, smile or try to be kind even when you don’t feel like it, pay compliments, chase the kid’s runaway ball down the sidewalk and throw it back to him, try to be larger than you are— particularly when it’s difficult. People do notice, people appreciate. I appreciate it when it’s done to (for) me. Small gestures can be an effort, or actually go against our grain (“I’m not a big one for paying compliments…”), but the irony is that almost every time you make them, you feel better about yourself. For a moment life suddenly feels lighter, a bit more Gene Kelly dancing in the rain."

"Of course, you never really forget anyone, but you certainly release them. You stop allowing their history to have any meaning for you today. You let them change their haircut, let them move, let them fall in love again. And when you see this person you have let go, you realize that there is no reason to be sad. The person you knew exists somewhere, but you are separated by too much time to reach them again."

"Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I’m ready, this, for reasons I can’t explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don’t know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees.To everything a season, to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all."

"We spend most of our lives cutting down our ambitions because the world has told us to think small. Dreams express what your soul is telling you, so as crazy as your dream might seem—even to you—I don’t care: You have to let that out."

"If they don’t need you, it’s okay, you do not live for other people."

"Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know."

"We hear all the time that “men are visual creatures” and “women are emotional” and “women are attracted to personalities” and “it’s science” and blah blah blah, but I feel comfortable in saying that this is just essentialist garbage that obscures the fact that almost all human beings (who aren’t blind, that is) are visual creatures, regardless of our gender or our sexuality. Most of us like to look at people we find sexually appealing! It’s how we roll, and as long as we don’t treat each other badly because of it, there’s nothing wrong with that. What I do have a problem with is this belief that there is no such thing as the female gaze. It contributes to that god-awful “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” nonsense that acts like men and women are two alien species with virtually nothing in common, when the reality is that men and women have way more in common than not. Many women like to look at sexy people, and many men like their partners to be decent, interesting people. It’s not either/or, yet we keep acting like it is.

Mind you, this is not an argument for creating a culture in which everyone is objectified, which is how I feel things are going. I die a little inside when I hear about rising rates of guys with eating disorders or getting more plastic surgery or taking steroids in their pursuit of bigorexic ideals. Rather, what I want is a culture that accepts that people find a wider variety of bodies to be attractive and sexually appealing than just the ones that belong to a very tiny subset of young sylphlike women. I would also like to live in a culture that does not equate sexuality with dehumanization and objectification, but instead regards it as a very life-affirming aspect of being human, but I suppose that is a lot to ask for a culture that still has aneurysms whenever a woman dares breast-feed in public."

"When I say, ‘I love you,’ it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You’re a heck of a person."

"I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn’t that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they’ll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don’t know. She probably didn’t even know I was there. But I’ll always love her. All my life."

"We live in a society where romantic love is idealized: if we search long enough, we will find “the one,” the soulmate who is perfect for us, who will grow and change at the exact same rate we do, who loves us exactly as we are and never expects us to change, who always wants us sexually, never has bad breath or gets grouchy, and is perfectly desirable in every way. We expect our partner to fully meet us on an intellectual, physical, sexual, and spiritual basis; to be our lover, best friend, a companion, confidante, confessor, therapist, and family, all rolled into one. This sets up monumental expectations which all of us invariably fall short of."

"His fingers touched my hair, like he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. His mouth blurring my cheek and my ear. This close. I actually felt something. It wasn’t like with my boyfriend, but it was like when you want to hold onto something warm. That must be a kind of love and anyway his eyes got black and shadowy like backlanes, and I wanted to sit inside them so nobody could catch me."

"Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath."

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