Does somebody have an explanation why there's human flesh on the hall window upstairs?

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.