Calvin Trillin

And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death–but it’s more peaceful.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

The thing is, she’s got heart, a colossal, mesmerizing one. She gives me a green flash love, the type you are rarely lucky enough to see but when you do, your entire sky is changed forever.

Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.

You never miss what you’ve never had. I never had any other life. I didn’t know any other life.

Like an enemy I knew as intimately as any friend, I came to know the nagging, constant emptiness of the incongruent life. I ignored myself and lived for people, purposes, and goals that weren’t my own. I betrayed who I was and instead accepted a fictional substitute that was defined from the outside in.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.

This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.

It is bad luck to be superstitious.

Look beyond the individual to the cause of his misery.

Sometimes I think someone upstairs saved me from being ordinary.

And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.