The lesson was: DO what you like in life, not what you feel you “should.”

He valued “killers,” those with a single-minded focus who wouldn’t quit on a math problem until arriving at a solution. Simmons told another colleague that some academics were “super smart” yet weren’t original thinkers worthy of a position at the university.

Let the problem be … It will solve itself.

Sometimes I look at this and fell I’m just some guy who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Truth is much too complicated to allow for anything but approximations.

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I feel like it’s easier to find someone who will admit to being a real racist than it is to find someone who will admit to being an extrovert. The charmer at the party? Oh no, this stuff exhausts me. The energetic go-getter simultaneously climbing social and professional ladders? You wouldn’t believe how introverted I am. The person who of his own free will chooses to interview strangers for a living? Not me.  

Fortunately, this once-in-a-thousand-years statistical anomaly of introversion overload offers a massive upside in a Covid-ravaged world. Beaten, broken, and drained from all that pesky interaction with humans, the introverts can finally recharge in solitude. Praise be to Christ our Lord!

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Someone can truly believe it, but not me, not us. And by someone, I mean someone who is not alive, because anyone still breathing is programmed to think The Terrible can’t really happen, especially this iteration of human which has seen little but peace and growth. That “little” offers still further proof against panic: we have been through tough times before and always emerged victorious.

Past results don’t predict future outcomes and all other foreboding clichés have thus lost resonance. We can understand them on an academic level – multiply this probability by that one – but not at a level where we truly grapple with the consequences of numbers that declare a nonzero chance that life forever changes in awful ways. The numbers are, actually, quite beside the point since there aren’t numbers for that which has never happened before.

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honest, ugly feelings. Of course you don’t want to possess those feelings, and so stating your privilege is a wishful attempt to exorcise them. The hope is that by saying aloud I’m so lucky, reason will overwhelm Why do I want so much and remain so selfish when I already have so much?

It won’t.

you don’t want others to share it since greater universality would ruin your specialness.

If your weakness is unlinked to your identity, you want others to share it so you aren’t alone.

the easiest, most natural assumption is that something is off in that someone – even if that someone exhibits a preferable response.

who are tweaking anything (and everything) related to their bodies.

The first: those coveting weight loss. This is the largest contingent and the reason why damn near all health writing is geared toward weight loss.

The second: those trying to perfect themselves just ’cause. Some get off maximizing their minds, some get off maximizing their bodies. Both are worthy undertakings.

The third: those aiming to correct some underlying issue(s) unrelated to weight. This group is often mistaken for the second, even as there are far more participants in this one. Thus, if you observe some ostensibly fit person measuring out iron/phosphate ratios and organizing bags of supplements, it’s at least 70/30 that this individual is suffering in ways superficial appearance betrays.

is the one where I feel like I don’t have enough time. For some this feeling is induced by a list of nonsense tasks whose completion yields little in the way of accomplishment. It never is for me, and thus the not-enough-time feeling is precise evidence that I am filled with purpose.

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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when on prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it – perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than the grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.

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What writers have is a license also the freedom to sit – to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop…and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

Trying to show how much he doesn’t like publicity. Except if he isn’t a genius, there’s no good reason to read the novel. You don’t open a one-thousand-page book because you’ve heard the author’s a nice guy. You read it – once you prop the thing open at all – because you understand the author is brilliant. He’s grabbed the wrong lesson: The people who seem to adore the press the way, say, Pooh loves a honey jar, look foolish; but the people who seem to hate it also risk foolishness too, because the reader knows how good press must feel, like having the prettiest girl in school drop you a smile. Like having the whole country rub against your toes and twist between your ankles.

So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just – we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape – in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way-that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more.

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