sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

Real leaders are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.

...and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.

I'm very bright, but I'm terrified of sounding like someone who thinks he's very bright-because those people are assholes.