Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside.

You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.