All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose.  It is best so, no doubt.  The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

The totality of animals, the crushing majority of men, live without ever finding the least need for justification.


Michel Houellebecq, from his novel Submission as quoted by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.

We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.

Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Twitter—that device helpfully enabling people to write faster than they can think.


 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, How the Murdoch Gang Got Away (New York Review, Jan 8, 2015)

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck on top of it, bivouacked above the tree line, free, but freezing, with no way forward.

Tim Parks, The New Yorker (Reverend)

The smartphone-bearing zombies plodding blindly down our sidewalks still inhabit the real world even if their souls have gone elsewhere.

James Gleick, The New York Review of Dec. 18, 2014.

When did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

My moment-by-moment happiness is pretty low, but my life satisfaction is great.

From The New York Review of Dec 4, 2014.