The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick
“Everything blurred over time.”
“Have you noticed that far too often the best people in the world lack power?"
“Why do most people fail to give each other the fairy tale?”
“I get sidetracked easily by interesting things, and for this reason, people often find it hard to converse with me, which is why I don’t talk very much to strangers and much prefer writing letters, in which there is room to record everything, unlike real-life conversations where you have to fight and fight to fit in your words and almost always lose.)”
“She said she needed me, and it was nice to be needed.”
“In the Dalai Lama’s book A Profound Mind, you wrote in the afterword that our lives are like the beam of light coming out of a movie projector, illuminating the screen, which is emptiness. I liked that. It was good—beautiful.”
“it was better to let some things alone. Words could be used as weapons that do too much damage”
“God doesn’t always use words to speak to us, Bartholomew,” he said as we waited for a red light to turn green. “Sometimes we simply get feelings. Hunches. Have you had any of those?”
“It is important that we understand just how truly all-pervasive suffering is.”
“People grieve for all sorts of reasons. It’s probably best not to compare or try to measure.”
“Flowers just grow, and when it is time, they shoot colors out of their stems and become beautiful.”
“I thought of a line from the Dalai Lama’s book A Profound Mind: “‘We should work toward cherishing the welfare of others to the point where we are unable to bear the sight of their misery.”
“but I knew he would say it would all be revealed in God’s time and not our time—that we should simply wait for God to speak to me, for me to start hearing His voice, that we had to be patient.”
“What else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts? And isn’t it true, statistically speaking—regardless of whether we believe in luck or not—that good and bad must happen simultaneously all over the world?”
“For every bad thing that happens, a good thing happens too—and this was how the world stayed in harmony.”
“That in order for someone to win, someone else has to lose; and in order for someone to become rich, many others must stay poor; and in order for someone to be considered smart, many more people must be considered average or below average intelligence; and in order for someone to be considered extremely beautiful, there must be a plethora of regular-looking people and extremely ugly people as well; you can’t have good without bad, fast without slow, hot without cold, up without down, light without dark, round without flat, life without death—and so you can’t have lucky without unlucky either.”
“We don’t know anything. But we can choose how we respond to whatever comes our way. We have a choice always. Remember that!”
“Whenever something bad happens to us,” Mom said as she tucked me into my new bed, insisting that I needed some sleep after staying up all night, “something good happens—often to someone else. And that’s The Good Luck of Right Now. We must believe it. We must. We must. We must.”
“No. What happens to things is not important. Pray that your heart will be able to endure whatever happens to you in the future—your heart must continue to believe that the events in this world are not the be-all and end-all but simply transient unimportant variables. Beyond the everyday ins and outs of our lives, there is a greater purpose—a reason. Perhaps we don’t yet see or understand the reason—maybe our human minds are incapable of understanding fully—yet it all leads us to something greater nonetheless.”
“I found this Dalai Lama quote on the library Internet: “Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”
“Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’ No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.”
“To new beginnings, however strange they may be,”
“Sentimental. As if it were a character flaw. Like it was horrible to feel. To admit that you missed things. To care. To love even.”
“And I wondered if faith were not a form of pretending.”
“But unfortunately, it takes a lot more than kindness to survive in this world.”
“Because life was always evolving and changing, and therefore, no matter how much we’d like to, we would never, ever have that moment again—even if we tried with all our might to re-create it, going so far as wearing the same exact clothes even, we would fail, because you cannot beat time; you can only enjoy it whenever possible, as it zooms by endlessly.”
