Democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.            

In my defence I’m very tired and I don’t have any good ideas. Really my problem is that I’m annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none. And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people? What have I ever given the world to ask so much in return? I could disintegrate into a heap of dust, for all the world cares, and that’s as it should be.            

The ambitious rarely had ideas, and the talented were often lazy or impossible to be near.

Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data.

WIFE UNDER THE SEA? HERE’S THE NUMBER TO CALL.

A profound sadness filled the infinitesimal spaces of his brain like grout.            

I’m Yulia. Welcome to the end of the world.

This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything

Marketing is a lot more about thinking than doing.

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.

As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.

Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.

It’s amazing, what you’ll have to give up in this life.

Men, they’ll hurt you without ever really knowing you,” she often told me. “But women… women will know you deeply, intimately, and then hurt you. You tell me which is worse.

Countries that factionalize have political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than ideology, and these parties then seek to rule at the exclusion and expense of others.

Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth.

Getting lost and starting over is not failing at meditation, it is succeeding.

You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.

Hot-blooded hobgoblin of lore.

In 1954, Congress added the words “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the following year Eisenhower signed into law the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s currency. For evangelicals who believed that America was a Christian nation, the 1950s offered plenty of circumstantial evidence.

Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us. Small failures and major successes were equally reflective of our personal inadequacies or individual brilliance. Momentum was intoxicating, as was the feeling that we were all indispensable.

The Constitution cannot be made easy. It was never meant to be easy.

Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.