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Chapters (41)
  1. Cover
  2. Advance Praise for Normal Distance
  3. Title Page
  4. Prelude
  5. About Suffering
  6. The Idea of Beginning
  7. When It’s Hot It Snows
  8. New Theories on Boredom
  9. Wild Animals (Normal Distance)
  10. The Vagueness of the Moment
  11. I’m Not Mourning (There Is Voids)
  12. That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die
  13. Madness
  14. You Don’t Get to Decide How to Feel About Not Having Free Will
  15. The Quality of Nothing (After This Nothing Happened)
  16. Dramedy
  17. I Don’t Want to Hear Any Good News or Bad News
  18. Historians of the Future
  19. Yes & No
  20. That It Is Folly to Measure Truth & Error by Our Own Capacity
  21. Oral History
  22. Genealogy (Such Deep Creases)
  23. Mirror, Mirror
  24. Malice & the Unknown
  25. Bright & Distant Objects
  26. Random Assignment
  27. Stop Thinking & End Your Problems
  28. We Taste Nothing Pure
  29. In Nature
  30. The Beginning of Understanding Is the Wish to Die
  31. Jealousy Is the Gin
  32. Desiderata
  33. Detail
  34. Awake & Alone
  35. The Idea of a Meadow
  36. Don’t Think
  37. Certain Conditions
  38. Moon News
  39. Notes
  40. Acknowledgments
  41. About the Author

I want to say something, but nothing comes to mind that’s not a cliché or a lie.

I want someone to apologize to me, but not a specific person, and not for a specific thing.

I want to go to sleep and wake up and not be a terrible person.

I want to donate my personality to science.

I don’t particularly want to suffer and then die in a war.

I don’t want TO DIE, I just want to BE DEAD.

I wish my mind could be freed from this rickety carcass.

I wish “war” didn’t have such noble connotations.

I don’t understand what’s so great about eclipses; we don’t want for signs of doom.

I’ll go gentle into that good night if I fucking want to.

I want nothing so much as a real operatic cry. Like, on stage.

I wish, at the end of each day, the judges would tell me I’m “safe.”

I never close the windows on planes.

People who close the windows on planes: I guess you don’t want to feel melancholy and golden and sublime?

I always wanted dramatic, deep-set eyes and a widow’s peak.

I want a nightgown to wear as I walk into the sea.

I don’t want to feel good, I want to feel sad. Happiness lately feels mostly beside the point.

It’s not that I think I deserve punishment. Just weird fleeting wishes for tragedy. I don’t want people to get what they deserve?

What’s it called when you want bad things to happen?

Life is usually good/bad/good/bad. So when things are good it’s like, Well, this isn’t going to last!

When things are bad you can enjoy yourself.

When things are bad do you ever secretly wish for them to get worse?

Like I wanted it to be the same, but more so. I want to feel more of what I’m already feeling.

Maybe it’s a subconscious wish.

Part of me never wants it to end.

I wish rich people would stop having beautiful children.

General relativity says that “objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects ‘want’ to age as slowly as possible.”

Remember when people used to wish for world peace?

I’m making a wish as I throw this nickel in the trash.

I wish men wore ruffs and kilts and cummerbunds. Give me something to look at . . .

I want a house with a tree in it.

I want to wear lipstick in the woods.

I want to relive my life, but not for the first time. Again, from the outside!

I like the idea that someone might think I have impersonators.

I guess I want someone to think I’M the impersonator.

I want to be famous for being obscure. I’m getting closer to this.

I just took a nap and dreamed about it (not kidding).