Penpal Dathan Auerbach Quotes

We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.

Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves

It’s a bit poetic that it is so easy to take advantage of those who have no advantages to begin with.

How far can you go into the woods?

The world is a cruel place made crueler still by man.

Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself. – Harlan Ellison

a can-opener with no tuna made no sense to Boxes.

Our minds work hard to avoid dissonance – if we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world.

Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves, and when we do, it’s back to the void, and it’s time for more guesses toward a better life.

Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.

We were explorers. We were adventurers. We were friends.

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories. And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.

Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer.

When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember.

it’s often the case that one cannot know the breaking point of a thing until that thing fractures.

I wasn’t scared of the dark, I was scared of what could be hiding in it.

The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.

it's a bit poetic that it is so easy to take advantage of those who have no advantages to begin with

The concept of the Balloon Project was fairly straightforward. Each student would release a balloon with a note attached, and then would wait for a response from whoever happened to find the balloon.

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories.

if we remembered every detail of every day, we might find ourselves so fixated on the past that most of our memories would be of us just sitting in a dark room thinking about all of our yesterdays---too focused on what was to care at all about what will be.

Sitting in my car that night, I saw it all clearly for the first time. As an adult, I could see the connections that were lost on a child who tends to see the world in snapshots rather than as a sequence. The picture was complete, but I wished I had never seen it at all.

Right as my eyes were about to move onto the next photo in the sequence, they froze and focused on something that vexed me so powerfully that I can now, as I write this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable of only a single, repeating thought. Why am I in this picture?

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories. And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.

infected eyes and awkward, hunched comportment.

Our lives are so short that it seems a crime to squander any of it by forgetting. Memories extend our lives backward through time, making them feel longer. And that’s what we want. So we try to remember. But sometimes, when we do, we wish that we could just forget again.

His cries were coming from my walkie-talkie. Boxes never came home.

at any point in our lives we’ve forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away.

The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of those past experiences, most of the frames that haven't been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn't complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can't miss what you don't remember.

far can you go into the woods?

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time.

The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of these past experiences, most of the frames that haven’t been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember.

When I was younger, I took a job at a deli that had what the owner called an “ice cream buffet.