She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10-12 hours a day. And I mean, the difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything. And I certainly never - I never trained seriously after the age of 16.

I find in myself a need to get very away.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.