Handbook For Mortals Quotes

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.

This I have always known - that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

The gods had some very strange ways of making mortals immortal or invulnerable.

Fat” is just the current catchall word for all the things that we as a culture are afraid of: women’s rights, people refusing to acquiesce to cultural pressures of conformity, fear of mortality. [People who hate fat people] see body love as a move toward people taking charge of their lives and choosing what they want to do, no matter what the culture says. This is really scary to a lot of people. The anger they express is actually toward themselves. A person who hates seeing a happy, liberated person wishes they had the strength to do that, but they are too entrenched or “bought in” to the way things are right now to see it as a beautiful thing. So they see it and they hate it . . . People have invested a lot of time and a lot of resources into this game that says “thin wins.” So when people see exceptions to that rule, they feel personally invalidated, personally stolen from, personally affronted.

If it is...not just one's own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world--that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise--then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.

Society tells my students that people like them should aspire to prison the same way I understood I would go to college. They only listen to media that reinforces what they’ve been told all their lives: that they are worthless and that they will die or be incarcerated before they reach twenty-five.