“The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.”

It’s really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place – relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.

We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.

This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.

The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]

Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Just slip out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Stan, you don’t need to be coy, Roy, just get yourself free. Hop on the bus, Gus, you don’t need to discuss much, just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.

Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness.

But I want to be the first back to have back-to-back 2,000-yard seasons.

As we got back on the right track last season, including making up an eight-point gap in a few games, we just need to stay calm.

Looking back, now, I realize that you only ever need one person who lights up that way when you enter a room.

Regardless of whether they loved us back or treated us fairly or understood our shortcomings.

When I go back in to re-record a line. I’m the icing on the cake, but the cake is the thing.