A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

Here is what happens in middle age: Some friends and acquaintances who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.

Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

It is with eight lengthy legs we use to catch food, balance and knit a beautiful silk bed, but as babies we had lost our bones and skin, and hence our legs we had shed.

Step into the spotlight and rock the brand of you!

We still and always want waking.

The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.

What is opportunity to the man who cant use it?

Any opportunity to serve in the Church is a blessing.

I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you into my heart. I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had, and lift you like a prayer to the sky.

you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

Here we stop. Upon the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, his finger on his lip.