Latest Quotes

“In short, I set out to write about the darkness in men, but I ended up with a book about how men keep the darkness in check.”

— Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he had said to my mother: 'Go and comfort him.' Mamma stayed that night in my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination those hours which were so different from anything that I had had a right to expect, for when Françoise…”

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann's Way

“I drag myself to the gym like a shift worker dragging himself to the factory. I limp onto the mat feeling tired and old, and after I warm up and get going . . . I have so much fun. The blubbery, congested sensation of incipient middle age gives way, and I feel young again, and strong. When I've comp…”

— Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“The intern broke off from us to join one of the groups and Diane led us out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen, also giant, a thousand copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above an island the size of my apartment. I was introduced to Diane's friend, a handsome woman with silver hair, silv…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“Are we so accustomed to being watched that we cannot feel real, cannot feel our experiences to be real, unless we are watching and reporting on them?”

— Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics

“And now, my friends, let me come to the paramount issue. If they ask us why it is that we say more on the money question than we say upon the tariff question, I reply that, if protection has slain its thousands, the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands. If they ask us why we do not embody i…”

— William Jennings Bryan , vassar.edu

“And all these gradations of meaning at once, three minds interlocking like a color wheel, focusing to the central white spot of revelation and truth. There were no barriers, as in oral conversation. Like light the thoughts intermeshed and wove in question, answer, and statement, and despite the conc…”

— Henry Kuttner, Mutant

“Here I was, a literature professor who'd been raised in the feminized (or at least androgynized) world of left-wing academia and the Unitarian Church. And yet I could have easily fought the guy over... what? I had so much to lose — certainly my job, probably my teeth — and so little to gain. And yet…”

— Jonathan Gottschall, The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch

“Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cort…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased— the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction. When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one displ…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan's skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the pr…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Ale…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don't look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight— a blank expression as the body begi…”

— Ben Lerner, Orality and Literacy

“I cannot help you, because the questions are so difficult that it would run counter to the sense of this task of thinking to suddenly step out in public in order to preach and dispense moral censures.”

— Martin Heidegger, ditext.com

“Our culture depends in many ways on the creation of standards and conventions that we all must adhere to. These conventions are often expressed in terms of opposites— good and evil, beautiful and ugly, painful and pleasurable, rational and irrational, intellectual and sensual. Believing in these opp…”

— Robert Greene, Mastery

“I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. What a mess life has been. Now I know everything. Coming, coming, coming to drown me. There it is. How…”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“Confidence is important, but if it is not based on a realistic appraisal of who you are, it is mere grandiosity and smugness.”

— Robert Greene, Mastery

“There are an infinite number of methods to attain knowledge; finding the right method is up to the individual.”

— Kenya Hara, Designing Design