Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.