Steve Almond
Steve Almond
Steve Almond is an American short-story writer, essayist and author of ten books, three of which are self-published...
summer school clothes
At about the age of ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.
broken nostalgia ridiculous
It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.
soul jukebox misery
Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.
beautiful halloween night
But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts,snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipopsticks all akimbo, the foli ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.
art lying writing
Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
life answers freak
The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.
grief rage cloaks
Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.
journey emotional self
It is certainly true that cooking is therapeutic, creative and all those other faintly creepy self-helpish words. I would love to tell you that learning to cook was part of my journey toward actualization. I would love to tell Oprah this. I would love to tell Oprah this while weeping. But I learned to cook for a much simpler reason: in the abject hope that people would spend time with me if I put good things in their mouth. It is, in other words (like practically everything else I do), a function of my desperation for emotional connection and acclaim.
language aspiration
All language is an aspiration to music.
giving-up stress taken
The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.
beautiful halloween night
Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.
wise true-friend life-is-short
We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love.
teacher parent who-we-are
A good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are.
distance dirty fog
But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness. At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.