‎Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving?

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.