I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I'm so tired.

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.