“I truly believe we can overwhelm the darkness of this world by shining something brighter and more beautiful…our world is desperately in need of imagination, for we have spent so much creatvity devising ways destroying our enemies that some folks don’t even think it’s possible (much less practical) to love them.”

“We don’t know; we can only believe, and such faith will always be mysterious and ambiguous. But this isn’t a bad thing; quite to the contrary, it is liberating and just.
It is precisely when we think we know something about God that we start erecting boundaries and instituting discipline.”

[good thoughts, but overall I found this both too simplistic and specific to satisfy.]

“Beauty’s overrated. Only someone who took his own beauty for granted could have been able to say something so outrageously stupid with a straight face.”

“I found myself using the same phrases, the same adjectives in the same order. It became possible to recount the events without reliving them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them.”

“I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.”

“you must realize…that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall”

“Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.”

alain de botton
never fails to wow me.
wish he would write more…

(it’s a children’s book!)
and if you keep that in mind?
one of the year’s best.

maybe i’m biased.
the only good story was
Dave Eggers’ (of course).