Lightning Bug Quotes

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.

And if there’s one thing in this world I’ve ever known for sure, it’s that this girl is gonna crush me like a small bug, leave me so fucking broken there’ll be body bags beneath my eyes from nights I cried so hard the stars died. But I’m like, go ahead. I’m all yours. I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm, cause I’d rather be left for dead than left to wonder what thunder sounds like.

If you were my girlfriend I would give you a hundred lightning bugs in a green glass jar, so you could always see your way. I would give you a meadow full of wildflowers, where no two blooms would ever be alike. I would give you my bicycle, with its golden eye to protect you. I would write a story for you, and make you a princess who lived in a white marble castle. If you would only like me, I would give you magic. If you would only like me.

She never collected lightning bugs in bottles; you learn a lot more about something when it's not in a jar.

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

I am but a firefly caught in his jar and when he looks at me, I can’t help but glow.

I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!

They looked for one another when nothing else was happening, the way you pick up a magazine or look in the cupboard for a snack. Not exactly by accident and not exactly on purpose. You could go out in the world and do new things and meet new people, and then you could come home and just sit on the stoop with someone you had never not known, and watch lightning bugs blink on and off.

I took the dog out for a walk tonight, and together we wandered across the meadow next door. It was a warm summer's night, dark, and moonless. There were a handful of fireflies flickering intermittently, some so close to me I could see they were burning green as they flew, and some further away, who seemed to be flashing white. And in the sky above them a continual roil of distant summer lightning (the storm distant enough that it was silent) burned and flashed and illuminated the clouds. It seemed as if the lightning bugs were talking to the lightning, in a perfect call and response of flash and counterflash. I watched the sky and the meadow flash and flash while the dog walked ahead of me, and realised that I was perfectly happy...

She never collected lightning bugs in bottles; you learn a lot more about something when it’s not in a jar.

The night wears on; the fire dwindles; the wind shifts and my heart aches with nostalgia - summer camps and catching lightning bugs and August skies aflame with stars. The way the desert smells and the long, wistful sigh of wind rushing down from the mountains as the sun dips beneath the horizon.

I didn't just see fireworks, I felt them. I felt like I'd eaten a million lightning bugs when I was with him. He made my soul brighter, and that's all you can ask for when you're in love.

But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.

If I could store lightnings in jars, I'd sell them to sick fireflies to light their way. Only they have nothing to pay for it with but life.

The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug" (Mark Twain),

When I was a little girl, I used to try and bring sunshine to my mother. I felt so bad that she had never really seen or felt it. So I would try and catch it in jars. When that failed, I captured jars and jars of lightening bugs and told her that if we could catch enough of them, then it would look like the sun. She’d laugh, hug me, and then set them free and tell me that nothing should have to live its life in a cage. (Cassandra)

My longing for someone to talk to made Himillsy the lightning bug in my honey jar. I punched holes in the lid so she could breathe.

A herd of minuscule lightning bugs poured out of One-Eye's nostrils. Good soldiers all, they fell into formation, spelling out the words Goblin is a Poof.

Dark summer grass. Lightning bugs in their slow flashing. The night above you was more in you than your breath, the stars always shifting in your chest. from “Night Sky

Her resolutions against Jim Meserve were just like the lightning-bugs holding a convention. They met at night and made scorning speeches against the sun and swore to do away with it and light up the world themselves. But the sun came up next morning and they all went under the leaves and owned up that the sun was boss-man in the world.

Like a lightning bug... Like a lightning bug?... Yes, just like a night lightning bug; because there are day lightning bugs too - even if nobody has ever seen one, I know there are some, and I know the day lightning bugs are the cockroaches that since they can't light up, people kill them.

A firefly landed on Honor’s sleeve and began walking up her shoulder, its tail still blinking. As she craned her neck to look down at it, Jack chuckled. “Don’t be scared. It’s just a lightning bug.” He placed his finger in its path. Honor tried not to think about the pressure of his touch. When the firefly crawled onto his finger, he lifted it up and let it fly off, signaling its escape route with sparks of light.

The difference between love and sex is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.

Mark Twain once put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Power

Emotions flickered in the amber depths, one after another, like lightning bugs winking on and off. Disgust. Anger. Mistrust. Suspicion. Curiosity.

What about you? Girlfriend? Wife? Kids? Perhaps a gaggle of towheaded, extra large boys who already excel at sports and know how to make fire with the ass end of a lightning bug?

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. MARK TWAIN Did

Laughter layered the walls and clung to the dust mites, making them sparkle like lightning bugs in the daytime.

But as Mark Twain once observed, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is as the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. So do strive for that right word!

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.- Mark Twain (Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888)

The difference between the ALMOST right word and the RIGHT word is really quite a large matter. It's the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right ? Didn't write any decent characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine.

Maybe before a big storm rolls in, you’ll use it to catch fireflies (see, I did remember something, city mouse. But they’re still lightning bugs down here). And if you do, just remember, the storm doesn’t last forever. It can scare you; it can shake you to your core. But it never lasts. The rain subsides, the thunder dies, and the winds calm to a soft whisper. And that moment after the storm clouds pass, when all is silent and still, you find peace. Quiet, gentle peace. That’s what I wish for you. Even if you couldn’t find it with me.

Hiding had been effortless in New York City. Getting lost in a sea of people was as easy as stepping onto a crowded Subway car. Sweet Laurel Cove would be very different. Generations of families filled its church pews, ran its farms, and schooled its children. Anonymity was as rare as lightning bugs in wintertime—as her grandmother would say.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Dully she watched fireflies scribbling across the night. She never collected lightning bugs in bottles; you learn a lot more about something when it's not in a jar.

She’d never even seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” --Mark Twain

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

As Mark Twain once put it, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

There'll be the lightning bugs with their Morse code display, And shooting stars and constellations to befriend; The dragonflies will keep us from going astray, As we search for new adventures 'round every bend. -excerpted from the poem 'The Huge Playroom that is Nature' in the book FROM GUAM TO CROWN CITY CORONADO (THANKS TO HERMANN, MISSOURI): A JOURNEY IN POESY

Mark Twain knew the importance of making the correct word choice. He said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Automatic is what I can manage. Isn't there enough to pay attention to OUTSIDE the car? All I want inside a car is music. When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I'll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it ISN'T there. The same thing happens when I think about you. Although the trajectory is different--it is not the past, a past we haven't shared, but the future I am taken to by how quickly you have left. I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!

The lightning bugs are back. They fly low to the ground as the lawn dissolves from green to black in the dusk. Seeing them, I can reconstruct a childhood: a hot night under tall trees; the Good Humor man, in his square white truck, the freezer smoky when he reaches inside for an ice cream. The lightning bugs trapped in empty jars with holes on top. "Let them out," our mother said, "or they will die in there." We were careless. We always forgot to open the jars. The bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, pathetic as they lay on their backs. We were always horrified by what we had done. As night fell we shook them out and caught more. I relive the magic of the yellow light without the bright white of hindsight. The little flares in the darkness, a distillation of the kind of life we think we had, we wish we had, we want again.

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right? Didn’t write any decent girl characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine.

I accept that one day, my music will be gone forever. So will the Sistine Chapel, Bruce Lee movies, and all the silly arts and crafts my aunt ever bought. Gone with the wind. Making songs is something I do here and now. Because light captured is just a moment, a flicker.

But Kit had always felt something loosen inside him when he opened a book. It was the feeling of opening the door to the first spring day after a hard winter; it was a green sap, blue sky, fresh breeze kind of feeling. Like you had lightning bugs flickering on inside you.

The Geek Girls Were we never robins? No, we never were. No one recognized spring in us, though great elms grew inside our rib cages. They pushed their spiny tips outward, so that we felt small stabbings daily, but they never broke through. So we were never spring, never foliage. We were the small and oddball beasts: anoles, silverfish, shrimp. We moved fast and sideways, upways, allways but straight. We heard of nights lit with lightning bugs and cigarettes. With rumflame and tonguefire. We needed none of it. The nights were black puzzleboxes and we solved them. It was easy— in the darkness, our minds sparked like flint.

an intention that radiates out of you. It’s humility and gratitude. It’s about living inside the notes, and between them, and understanding that each of those notes may mean a completely different thing to each person in an audience. Once it leaves your fingertips or your lips, it’s no longer yours. Maybe it never was.

There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown. His dive is infuriatingly graceful.

I highly recommend enforced boredom as a way to develop your imagination. But don’t take my advice; listen to Neil Young. He said it best: “There’s a lot to learn for wasting time.

It's always the easy way out, being an existential chicken. Not really being there. It's harder, it's riskier, to be present.

No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation? A society highly paradoxical, with alarming in-equities, but with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs through the night? No war was ever fought for so many different reasons meeting in one reason clear as crystal. They fought to preserve their iden-tity. Their political identity, their personal identity.

As you get closer to finding your voice, you’ll feel resistance. You’ll want to retreat. It’s scary to just be you. You may notice that criticism from others starts to sting more, because now it’s personal. You’re being seen and addressed directly, not through the sunglasses you finally removed. But once you’ve relaxed, you can apply the effort to the important part—that which projects and amplifies the expression of the real you. That’s technique.

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” He was droll but incomplete. During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven’s Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

My heart was saying If you were my girlfriend I would give you a hundred lightning bugs in a green glass jar, so you could always see your way. I would give you a meadow full of wildflowers, where no two blooms would ever be alike. I would give you my bicycle, with its golden eye to protect you. I would write a story for you, and make you a princess who lived in a white marble castle. If you would only like me, I would give you magic. If you would only like me.

Has it ever occurred to you- have you never, somewhere along the line, received vibrations to the effect- that this territory was a separate nation? No matter what its political bonds, a nation with its own people, existing within a nation? A society highly paradoxical, with alarming inequities, but with the private honor of thousands of persons winking like lightning bugs through the night? No war was ever fought for so many different reasons meeting in one reason clear as crystal. They fought to preserve their identity. Their political identity, their personal identity.

And yet, my research shows that this isn't actually the case. The lightning bug researchers discovered that when the fireflies were able to time their pulses with one another with astonishing accuracy (to the millisecond!), it allowed them to space themselves apart perfectly, thus eliminating the need to compete. In the same way, when we help others become better, we can actually increase the available opportunities, instead of vying for them. Like the lightning bugs, once we learn to coordinate and collaborate with those around us, we all begin to shine brighter, both individually and as an ecosystem.

Moths, large and white and fluttering in a manner just a little too bat-like, came out of hiding to revel in this unexpected dismissal of day. So too did fireflies: Rapunzel squealed in delight when, like tiny candles, they twinkled in slow, unhurried loops around grass. "Is this your mother's magic?" she shrieked, clawing at Gina's arm. " ARE THOSE FAIRIES ?" "No, those are lightning bugs, Princess," Flynn said with a sigh. "In-sects. Whose butts glow." "Right. I'm an idiot," Rapunzel said, trying to get one to land on her. "Because in real life, fairies aren't real but witches are." "Touché," he said good-naturedly, with a bow. Rapunzel felt her chest flutter.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.

I didn’t love every group I encountered. In fact, I’ll be quite happy to never see gun-and-coin dude again. But I learned to stand in other people’s shoes, as much as a child can. It’s hard to view certain people as anything but monsters, yet there’s value in giving it the old college try. By dignifying even the most despicable character as a human being, by offering them what empathy we can manage, we also hold them accountable for their choices.

How can you say such things?!' demanded Kon Fiji. 'Our lives may have changed, but death has not. Respect for the elderly and honor given for a life well lived connect us to the accumulated wisdom of the past. When you die, do you wish to be buried as a common peasant instead of as a great scholar worthy of admiration?' 'In a hundred years, Master Kon Fiji, you and I will both be dust, and even the worms and birds who feast on our flesh will also have traveled through multiple revolutions of the wheel of life. Our lives are finite, but the universe is infinite. We are but flashes of lightning bugs on a summer night against the eternal stars. When I die, I wish to be laid out in the open so that the Big Island will act as my coffin, and the River of Heavenly Pearls my shroud; the cicadas will play my funeral possession, and the blooming flowers will be my incense burners; my flesh will feed ten thousand lives, and my bones will enrich the soil. I will return to the great Flow of the universe. Such honor can never be matched by mortal rites enacted by those obeying dead words copied out of a book.

Here's my suggestion to musicians: When you're about to reach for whatever musical tools you use, virtual or real, guitar or computer, ask yourself if you're doing so to save time or because you don't feel like straining your brain. Or, more important, ask yourself if you have anything to say yet. If not, keep working (or playing) upstairs, in your brain. Sure, it's okay to react to what happens when playing with the tools -- or the way a chord sounds, a loop, or even an accident. But make sure you express what you wanted to say or what you imagined. Don't let your tools make you their bitch.

I’m amazed when someone sees the sculpture inside a rock while the rest of us just see a rock. I say “hell yes” to the architects who imagine the spaces we will one day live in. And a round of applause for the stylist who sees what hair to cut to make me look respectable for a couple of weeks. I bow low and fast in the direction of those who paint amazing things on the ceilings of chapels, make life-changing movies, or deliver a stand-up routine that recognizes the humor in the mundane. What all those artists have in common is that they point out things that were always there, always dotting the sky. Now we can take it in and live what we missed.

lived in the house. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and friends. A grill was set up on the patio, and delicious smells wafted from platters of burgers on picnic tables in the yard. It was the perfect sort of day for Munchy to get her fill of people blood. Who would have thought that giving a person one tiny bite could result in such a delightful snack? Munchy was aware that most people thought she was a pest. They tried to swat her whenever she got near, but Munchy was fast and an expert at dodging humans’ flailing fingers. I don’t want to hurt anyone, Munchy thought. But a mosquito bite just takes a second, and then I fly off to find the next person. Satisfied at last, Munchy buzzed back to the garden where she lived with her best friends Wiggly Worm, Rattles Snake, and Snarky Snail. “I’m full!” she announced. “I don’t think I’ll eat for a week!” “There’s some kind of celebration going on over there,” remarked Wiggly, who was playing in the dirt. “I know!” smiled Munchy. “The family has so many guests over—so many guests with delicious blood.” Snarky made a face. “I think it’s the Fourth of July or something—but, Munchy, do you really have to do that to people? Mosquito bites make them awfully uncomfortable.” “Only for a second,” Munchy replied. “It’s just an itty-bitty sting.” “No, it isn’t,” protested Snarky, who ventured into the backyard more than any of his friends. “Mosquito bites are itchy and uncomfortable for a long time—sometimes several days. I’ve seen those two little kids scratching and complaining about bites you’ve given them.” “I think that’s true,” agreed Rattles, who also went into the yard more often, now that the humans knew he was a friendly rattlesnake. “Oh, no,” murmured Munchy. Mosquito bites hadn’t seemed like a big deal before—but they did now. She didn’t want to be responsible for making people feel itchy all the time! With a sigh, Munchy said, “I guess I’ve got to quit. From now on, I’ll stick to sugar-water shakes at the Garden Town soda fountain—but it isn’t going to be easy!” With some help from her friends, Munchy was able to stop biting people once and for all. And, when the other mosquitoes that lived in the garden heard about her new lifestyle, they decided to give it a shot, as well. In no time, the backyard was practically a mosquito-safe zone! The kids and their friends could now play in the yard for hours with no worries about being bitten. They had no more itchy skin and no more discomfort. Munchy felt like she had done a wonderful thing. And no one ever tried to swat her away again! Just for Fun Activity Make itty-bitty bugs using circles of Fun Foam for bodies, tissue paper cut-outs for wings, googly eyes (you can find them at craft stores), and shortened pipe cleaners for long, skinny noses and legs. Have fun!

They would catch the lightning bugs that came up out of the laurels lining the creek and then put them into mason jars or wear them as glow rings on their fingers.

but this check was a full ten times what his normal check to her was. And the envelope was brighter, as if filled with lightning bugs, lit by his hope.

Jack opened his eyes. They were wearing their own clothes again. A lightning bug blinked inside the growing darkness of the tree house. Annie picked up Morgan’s note. She repeated the rhyme: To find a special magic, You must

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.’ —Mark Twain

Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.

And then the quiet two-and-a-half-hour bus ride back in the dark, just the soft glow from people’s phones going on and off throughout the bus around us, like we were inside a jar of lightning bugs in summer.

Batty ran up, her hands cupped together. “I caught one named Horatio,” she said, and spread open her hands. A lightning bug balanced uncertainly on her thumb. “Look, he’s blinking,” said Jane. “He’s trying to tell us something in Morse code.” “What?” asked Batty. “Please... let... me... go,” said Jane.

creaked like old bedsprings. Lightning bugs made a trail of yellow specks in the dimming air. He and Boyd used to wait until they blinked, then pull their bodies apart and smear the glowing mush on their faces.

The fundamental truth is that you are the light you are seeking. You are already enlightened, as your biological reality is that you are a being of light, down to your DNA, your cells, and the trillions of biophotons that permeate your entire being. Even your bones, the densest part of your physical being, are piezoelectric crystalline structures that make electricity (light) when they are compressed. And this light that powers you is the same light that powers the sun and the stars, the lightning and the lightning bugs, and the cosmos in its entirety. We are electromagnetic beings bathed in an electrically connected reality. You are vast. You contain multitudes. What has been obstructing that knowing and being is just a story; distorted waves in space that can be •tuned• back to their underlying harmonious perfection. Beneath the noise in the signal and stories of victimhood and struggle, you are simply one with the unified field, the cosmos itself – you are the universe. And from that perspective everything is possible.

The end of the day grew long on the hills, then the dark pulled in close around us. Snowflakes looped and glared in the headlights like off-season lightning bugs.

That her choice was really him. The silver ringed the blue, and he let himself fall into that circle of fiery heat. His little lightning bug. A force to be reckoned with. A delicate pixie dancing in the grass, lighting up the sunset, flashing fire, a warrior when needed.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who sprang through the open window by my bed and pummeled my chest, barely sheathing his claws. I’ve been bloodied and mauled, wrung, dazzled, drawn. I taste salt on my lips in the early morning; I surprise my eyes in the mirror and they are ashes, or fiery sprouts, and I gape appalled or full of breath. The planet whirls along and dreaming. Power broods, spins, and lurches down. The planet and the power meet with a shock. They fuse and tumble, lightning, ground fire; they part, mute, submitting, and touch again with hiss and cry. The tree with the lights in it buzzes into flame and the cast-rock mountains ring. Emerson saw it. “I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.” All of it. All of it intricate, speckled, gnawed, fringed, and free. Israel’s priests offered the wave breast and the heave shoulder together, freely, in full knowledge, for thanksgiving. They waved, they heaved, and neither gesture was whole without the other, and both meant a wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks. Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, said the bell. A sixteenth-century alchemist wrote of the philosopher’s stone, “One finds it in the open country, in the village and in the town. It is in everything which God created. Maids throw it on the street. Children play with it.” The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray, I go my way, and my left foot says “Glory,” and my right foot says “Amen”: in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every

That night, I dream of amber eyes and lightning bugs.

A glance that has the power to resurrect every body I’ve buried. Flickers of hope that feel a lot like lightning bugs you can catch, but if you hold them too long, they’ll lose their spark.

They said, ‘We just gave you the 8086 last week! How could you report a bug already?’”, Tesler recalled. But Intel had not reckoned with PARC’s do-it-yourself mentality. Years earlier the lab had purchased a rare million-dollar machine known as a Stitchweld, which could turn out printed circuit boards overnight from a digital schematic prepared on Thacker’s SIL program. “It turned out that no one else using the 8086 had Stitchwelds. Everyone else was going through complicated board designs, so they wouldn’t know for months if there was a bug. But at Xerox we gave them that feedback in a few days.

Then before you know it, you're living with an all-new creature--cuter than ever, but suddenly opiniated, stubborn, and lightning fast. Welcome to toddlerhood! Toddlerhood is one of the joyous high points of parenthood. There's nothing like a one-, two-, or three-year-old to help you see the world in wonderful new ways: the bugs in the grass...the shapes in the clouds...the "castles" in a pile of sand. Toddlers brim with curiosity, excitement, and irresistible charm.

Lightning bugs, he’d always thought, were like messengers of the Lord. Coming in, giving you a moment of happiness, and then disappearing.

I came in for what I assumed would be a spanking and instead was leaving with a full music scholarship? For being an asshole? I was blown away!

Sometimes I punch myself hard as I can Yelling “Nobody cares,” hoping someone will tell me how wrong I am

People often ask me if it’s scary to make up a song onstage, dictating parts, on the fly, to a full orchestra. Well, no. It doesn’t occur to me to worry about that. I have a jazz musician’s view of mistakes. If you play a wrong note, you can always make the same mistake again on purpose and make it sound right. Insistence on the mistake can be quite musical. Indeed, “once is a mistake, twice is jazz,” a quote often attributed to Miles Davis.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

So sure, I had to dig out of a little insecurity hole vocally, but I don’t blame my parents for this. We are all a work in progress.

You always notice the holidays more when you feel the most alone.

By dignifying even the most despicable character as a human being, by offering them what empathy we can manage, we also hold them accountable for their choices.

But don’t take my advice; listen to Neil Young. He said it best: “There’s a lot to learn for wasting time.

Finally, empathy and perspective are everything, and neither should be taken for granted. After all, there’s always someone out there who thinks you’re the monster. Remember that the ground beneath your feet can always shift and that it should always be questioned. Even the things that seem still are still changing —From “Still,” Over The Hedge soundtrack, 2004

You haven't lived until you've been screamed at by an Elvis impersonator until AAA shows up.

I also have a fond memory of reading our first really bad review in the U.K. It was of a live show at Shepherd's Bush Empire. Most of the piece was dedicated to personal jabs at me. The way I talked, what I wore, how the audience and I deserved each other for being such twats, my sagging weak chin and wimpy shoulders. This reviewer didn't let up on me for two pages. After Robert got through the brutal review, getting more and more upset with each word, completely steamed and ready to fight, he exploded, 'What an asshole! He never mentioned me once.

I don't want to sound like a whiny little bitch. I can certainly appreciate how amazing all this was. How fortunate we were. It was a trip of a lifetime. But the success felt like a detour, oddly. A fluke. When I first sat down to write this book and reflected on this peak time of Ben Folds Five, it was difficult to identify what lessons, if any, could be gleaned and passed on.