1. The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

2. Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.

3. What you give to a thief is stolen.

4. Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.

5. You’ve never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.

6. Our avocations bring us the purest joys. Praise my salads or my softball, and I am deified for a day. But tell me I am a great teacher or a great writer and you force me to tell myself the truth.

7. Ah, what can fill the heart? But then, what can’t?

8. Shadows are harshest when there is only one lamp.

9. Desire’s most seductive promise is not pleasure but change, not that you might possess your object but that you might become the one who belongs with it.

10. I say nothing works any more, but I get up and it’s tomorrow.

11. A beginning ends what an end begins.

12. I walk up the drive for the morning paper and find myself musing, as if the news were fiction, Marvelous that they think of all this, so deadpan strange. Nothing is so improbable as the truth. If the day’s headlines hadn’t already happened, they would not happen.

13. Gravity’s reciprocal: the planet rises to the sparrow’s landing.

14. When a jet flies low overhead, every glass in the cupboard sings. Feelings are like that: choral, not single; mixed, never pure. The sentimentalist may want to deny the sadness or boredom in his happiness, or the freedom that lightens even the worst loss. The moralist will resist his faint complicity. The sophisticate, dreading to be found naive, will exclaim upon the traces of vanity or lust in any motive, as if they were the whole. Each is selling himself simplicity; each is weakened with his fear of weakness.

15. Road: what the man of two minds travels between them.

16. The cynic suffers the form of faith without its love. Incredulity is his piety.

17. Pessimists live in fear of their hope, optimists in fear of their fear.

18. Writer: how books read each other.

19. Some people live in a continual state of skepticism and annoyance that they cultivate as a kind of worldly wisdom and are always recruiting for. Let the sun come up and they will roll their eyes, Wouldn’t you know it? Profess to be content and they will be disappointed that you have sold your soul for trifles. They wait, hurt and righteous, for the world to prove it really loves them.

20. If the couple could see themselves twenty years later, they might not recognize their love, but they would recognize their argument.

21. Each lock makes two prisons.

22. Painting high on the house. Yellow jackets swarmed around me. I couldn’t convince them I was harmless, so I had to kill them.

23. All stones are broken stones.

24. Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.

25. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?

26. It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun . In the mind’s arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

27. The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us.

28. If the wise knew everything the foolish know, there would be no fools.

29. Pain is not a democracy.

30. Often my child asks for something utterly trivial not because she cares for it but because she needs to hear me say Yes, yes.

James Richardson <http://www.poems.com/vect2ric.htm> Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays <http://www.poems.com/vect2ric.htm> Ausable Press <http://www.ausablepress.com>