The best lines I read this year

Dear Friend of Sanity,

This was the year when I forgot how to read books, and then learned it back with a force that made me feel like I am racing to pack in as many words into my head as I can before my time on this planet runs out. Here, then, are the 10 best paragraphs I have read all year, on love, loneliness, and hope.

I hope they bring you happiness.

Love,
Tanmoy

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"Perhaps I am being too hard on myself, and perhaps when they are older they will have no cause to question my love for them. Perhaps they will read this someday and have no memory of me being angry at them, have no idea of me as anything other than a father who loved them as constantly and as calmly as they deserved. Perhaps they already understand why I'm out of the bed at two in the morning, at three-thirty, at five-fifteen. Perhaps I should have written about all of the ways in which I delight in my daughters, how, next to meeting my wife, being a father has been the greatest thing that has ever happened to me."

"God, I love young people," Harmon said. "They get griped about enough. People like to think the young generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good – and that's how it should be."

"Best to be like dill, Lucas has concluded. Not like basil, the most anxious and ingratiating herb, but also not like cilantro, that conflict-seeking lunatic. Be dill. Nobody cares about dill."

"In deciding what's going on, evidence is a much more reliable guide than fear. As the Russian proverb has it: trust, but verify. The alternative is to situate oneself in a world of jeopardy. It's to see life as a perpetual battle against an implacable foe. Like the doomed gangsters in Reservoir Dogs, it is to be tormented by the question: who is the rat?"

“My unexpected finding is that inside every man there lurk ancient caretaking tendencies that render a man every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother.”

"She wants to say so much more. Maybe he does too. But in the end all he can manage to utter is: 'I want you to know, Britt-Marie, that every time there’s a knock on my front door, I hope it’s you.'"

“If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there.”

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

“I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.”

“The priest and the receptionist joyfully and contentedly shared their genuine dislike of the world, including the entirety of the Earth's population. The burden was now only half as great, since each of them could take on three and a half billion people rather than seven billion alone.”

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