What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists – because these professions are more immune to randomness.

Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists – or anyone.

For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized. But reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying linear positive progression: You may study for a year and learn nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the empty results and give up, something will come to you in a flash.

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But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate. So when speakers stood up when the occasion demanded and said “Our beloved Mayor,” it was one of those statements that everybody says but not actually believes like “God is everywhere.”

he’s uh man at changes everything, but nothin’ don’t change him.

They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.

She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.

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It drives me crazy that people expect Donald Trump to change, that they still are aghast when he is who he has always been.

But do I do this in my own life? Do I expect people to change and evolve beyond their long-proven natures? If so, I should stop. Like, now.

All frustration comes from other people not behaving the way you want them to. 

Phone “addiction” is filled with far too much unrewarding wandering: rather than doing “nothing,” you might as well do “something,” so you scroll and click to pass time.

TV “addiction” is far more dangerous because there is such an abundance of content that’s richly rewarding, that’s truly more pleasurable than so much of “real life.” How does anyone ever sleep with so much good stuff to watch?

Though I guess “abundance” is quite subjective. If you spend enough time in either “addiction,” you reach the same point of unrewarding wandering. Worse still, there may well be a terrible price for extended trips into the passivity that’s endemic into screen consumption: you lose your own creativity.

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There’s some girl in pants costing no less than $125.95 standing at the x, posing for a few selfies pre-run. Once she sees me humming, the faux smile fades, the camera slides into a nifty side pocket, and she begins running in earnest. For she thinks she knows what’s coming. She thinks I’m going B-A-B, a popular route, no doubt, and she, like any person raised in this brutal dog-eat-dog world, wants to win. Still, while getting passed with her considerable head start would be unpleasant, it’s salvageable under some invented story about my genetically advantaged lung capacity. If that unfortunate outcome did indeed occur, she’d still probably receive credit from her friends for trying so hard on a Saturday when they themselves were busy indulging in “mindless” activities. What this poor victim didn’t know, however, was that I was going B-A-C-B, and losing the race to B given my impossible handicap would not be at all o.k.

Worse still, because she decided to never turn around, whereby she could have quickly understood I wasn’t going B-A-B and appreciated the humiliation risk in play, she assumed the lack of huffing and/or footsteps behind her meant the race, with 100 meters to go, was hers. Her mind thus drifted to which witty line or two to place underneath those pre-run selfies she now simply could not wait to post. The BE IN THE MOMENT gospel misses the beauty of daydreams like this. The moment was filled with one final climb, and she’d rather just skip ahead, in her mind, to what was to follow. No sensible person could blame her. Unfortunately, she happened to be dealing with a true menace, a menace who cares not about sensibilities or loyal IG followers.

The last anyone saw her, she was headed to xxxxxxxxx. I sure do hope they aren’t out of ventilators.

All ya gotta do is deprive yourself.

Wanna have the best lunch in what feels like centuries? Don’t eat for a week. Or, more plausibly, eat bare essentials for a week, and then eat “normal” foods again.

This is low-hanging joy available to anyone with a modicum of discipline.

on changes in people’s appearance – the reflex is too natural.

This reflex overrides any sense that the comment is often entirely devoid of substance and has been uttered by dozens of others too.

“Wow. A new beard.” What is the point of this?

I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.

A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.

But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.

It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.

My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “reget and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.”

In my sunglasses, I felt like a movie star. I couldn’t see myself, which helped the fantasy.

“I’m okay,” I said, though I liked being asked.

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is the joy in breaking it.