“The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.”

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

The overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about – was still startling.

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:

If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

That they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up

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.

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.

The morning coffee reminds me of your waking I stir to find you.

When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called ‘Dead End.’ The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff.

Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.

Coffee falls into the stomach. Ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop. the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink.

During the Depression, or back when we were fighting Hitler, people didn’t have time to sue a company if the coffee was too hot. There were urgent, pressing problems. If you think you have it tough, read history books.

No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.

When I wake up in the morning, I just can’t get started until I’ve had that first, piping hot pot of coffee. Oh, I’ve tried other enemas.