I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.