There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions.

Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap.

Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.

When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.

There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions.