We never forget that our lives are novels, here in Montreal, and we never forget what happens on the last page.
Read More“Being yourself” is rarely the solution and often the problem, especially if you suck. “The future,” Aaron Haspel wagers, “will marvel that we regarded ‘be yourself’ as sound moral advice.”
Read More“Here and there, black Americans have purported a certain worry as to just what Chinese people are saying when they say ‘nay-guh,’ but this has always been a kind of joke.”—John McWhorter
Read More“Fake it till you make it” usually means, in practice, “fake it till I believe you”. In other words, become a really good actor. If you can convince me, perhaps you can convince yourself; and if you can’t, well, it’s all the same to me, so long as you put on a good show.
Read More“If I knew I would be dead by this time next year I believe I would spend the months from now till then writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances, telling them, ‘You really were a great travel agent.’ Or ‘I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.’ Or ‘Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.’”—Tony Hoagland
Read More“There will, of course, be protest movements, and artists and writers will be urged to join them. It will be their moral duty—or so they will be told—to lend their voices to the cause. . . . But it’s tricky telling creative people what to create or demanding that their art serve a high-minded agenda crafted by others. Those among them who follow such hortatory instructions are likely to produce mere propaganda or two-dimensional allegory—tedious sermonizing either way. The art galleries of the mediocre are wallpapered with good intentions.”—Margaret Atwood
Read More“I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women, there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights.”—Margaret Atwood
Read MoreLove is not a liquid asset, which can be readily spent on strangers; and loving is rarely a zero-sum game.
Read More“Montreal remains one of the great cities of the world, and stories of Montreal’s demise are greatly exaggerated.”—Jason Mcdonald
Read More“What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less. . . . Your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either side.”—Oliver Burkeman
Read MoreIf you always pursue the unconventional, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first.
Read More“The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle..”—Oliver Burkeman
Read More“We invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.”—Johann Hari
Read More“Colleges generally ask a person distinguished by fantastic career success to give a speech in which they claim that career success is not that important.”—David Brooks
Read More“It seems incredible to us today, but fifty years ago, there was very little obesity in the Western world.”—Johann Hari
Read More“All of the political loathing . . . the hyper-partisanship and disunion, the sheer rage—all of it dates, in large part, from the 2008 financial crisis. That’s when sovereign citizenry spiked; that’s when negative partisanship, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, originated.”—Stephen Marche
Read More“The United States no longer functions as a nation. The ideas that motivated its system no longer convince. The symbols that once unified its people no longer hold up. The country no longer makes sense.”—Stephen Marche
Read MoreThe idea that disasters cause widespread PTSD is not proven, is highly disputed. It is also highly disputed that disaster victims need any sort of professional help to get better rather than social support to get better.
Read More“Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air.”—David Brooks
Read More“When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others.”—David Brooks
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