It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.

The 'deep' civic function of the humanities . . . is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled.

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don’t. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels—the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers.

Kafka didn't save me. He just told me I was drowning.