The Humans

The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change. I was something. And now I am something else. —Matt Haig

The Luminaries

If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view. —Eleanor Catton

Player Piano

Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Middlesex

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of […]

A Confederacy of Dunces

Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate. —John Kennedy Toole