“Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disi...”

“The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideasto make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitra...”

“Theres no escaping it, hed been fond of telling us when he was well, the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge yo...”

“The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires...”

“None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldnt bring m...”

“I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times they...”

“Nowadays some people have becomeintimate with thoughtsbut unfriendly with the heartThey have become a clueless eyethat does not see itself”

“Politics is clueless; I can claim -"I am a politician" only because I am not.”

“I mean, have you ever imaginedthe ocean is alive, and needs to tell us something important, and the only way it can talkis by making waves crash, and we just lounge there, drenched in cocoa butter,...”

“The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed t...”

“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.”

“From Olsen's Nation: "Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Irans nuclear program now stands as one. Standing as one, the world now sincerely regr...”

“Since the beginning of time, the ignorant have always screamed the loudest...They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions. Now after all these years, mankind had finally managed ...”

“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”

“At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pea...”