“The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors”

Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.

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.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

What pains me is that we are having a long distance relationship without a long distance.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

We travel great distances to find ourselves when we need to only look within.

Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.

Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.

Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast – or else there is nothing at all.