Vectors: 47 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

1.

The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.


2.

Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.


3.

What you give to a thief is stolen.


4.

Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.


5.

You've never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.


6.

Our avocations bring us the purest joys. Praise my salads or my softball, and I am deified for a day. But tell me I am a great teacher or a great writer and you force me to tell myself the truth.


7.

Ah, what can fill the heart? But then, what can’t?


8.

Shadows are harshest when there is only one lamp.



9.

Desire’s most seductive promise is not pleasure but change, not that you might possess your object but that you might become the one who belongs with it.


10.

I am saving good deeds to buy a great sin.


11.

Harder to laugh at the comedy if it’s about you, harder to cry at the tragedy if it isn’t.


12.

Disillusionment is also an illusion.


13.

Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.


14.

Even at the movies, we laugh together, we weep alone.


15.

Water deepens where it has to wait


16.

I could explain, but then you would understand my explanation, not what I said.


17.

All stones are broken stones.


18.

Easy to criticize yourself, harder to agree with the criticism.


19.

Tragic hero, madman, addict, fatal lover. We exalt those who cannot escape their dreams because we cannot stay inside our own.


20.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: then it is only distance that separates us.


21.

Every life is allocated one hundred seconds of true genius. They might be enough, if we could just be sure which ones they were.


22.

How much less difficult life is when you do not want anything from people. And yet you owe it to them to want something.


23.

If we were really sure we were one of a kind, there would be no envy. My envy demeans both of us—no wonder it is the hardest sin to confess. It says I am not who I think I am unless I have what you have. It says that you are what you have, and I could have it.


24.

Happiness is not the only happiness.


25.

Laziness is the sin most willingly confessed to, since it implies talents greater than have yet appeared.


26.

If you reason far enough you will come to unreasonable conclusions.


27.

The one who hates you perfectly loves you.


28.

What you fear to believe, your children will believe.


29.

Of our first few years we remember nothing: experience only slowly gives us the power to be formed by experience. If this were not true, our characters would be completely determined by our infant hours of darkness, pain and helplessness, and we would all be the same. For her first six months my daughter cried continuously, who knows why. Yet she is as happy and trusting and kind as if all that had never happened. It never did.


30.

The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road.


31.

We invent a great Loss to convince ourselves we have a beginning. But loss is a current: the coolness of one side of a wet finger held up, the faint hiss in your ears at midnight, water sliding over the dam at the back of your mind, memory unremembering itself.


32.

If you want to know how they could forget you, wait till you forget them.


33.

It’s easy to renounce the world till you see who picks up what you renounced.


34.

When my friend does something stupid, he is just my friend doing something stupid. When I do something stupid, I have deeply betrayed myself.


35.

If I didn't have so much work to keep me from it, how would I know what I wanted to do?


36.

Anger has been ready to be angry


37.

My deepest regrets, if I am honest, are not things I wish were otherwise, but things I wish I wish were otherwise.


38.

It’s easier to agree on the future than the past.


39.

Back then I wanted to be right about my estimate of my abilities. Now I want to be wrong.


40.

Time heals. By taking even more.


41.

Self-love, strange name. Since it feels neither like loving someone, nor like being loved.


42.

What I hope for is more hope.


43.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?


44.

You who have proved how much like me you are: how could I trust you?


45.

Desire, make me poor again.


46.

Experience tends to immunize against experience, which is why the most experienced are not the wisest.


47.

All things in moderation, wisdom says. And says last Do not be too wise.




by James Richardson