Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

I would argue that stupidity is born out of bad reading, bad teaching and bad thinking!

We just did an awesome job of not dying.

The United States Congress, like a lot of rich people, lives in two houses.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

But why Alaska?' I asked her. 'Well, later, I found out what it means. It's from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means 'that which the sea breaks against,' and I love that. But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be.

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.