“We don’t need to be pampered, or lectured, or adored. We’re not goddamn babies anymore. We just want to be manipulated with a little fucking consideration.”—Tony Hoagland

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“To some extent, disasters can amplify romantic feelings because of a phenomenon known as the misattribution of arousal, in which people confuse emotional stimulation or even physical danger for a state of romantic arousal. . . . They tend to hasten happy couples to increase their commitment and nudge unhappy ones to part ways.”—Nicholas A. Christakis

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“When I get hopeless about human life, which, to be frank, is far too difficult for me, I try to remember that in the desert there is a little butterfly that lives by drinking urine.”—Tony Hoagland

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As Nicholas A. Christakis rightly observes in Apollo’s Arrow (2020), many of you are getting played by our enemies. Many of you are useful idiots. And you’re probably not as popular on Twitter as you think you are: “analysis of two hundred million tweets about the pandemic collected from January through May 2020 found that 62 percent of the top one thousand retweeters were bots.”

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“Inscriptions on limestone slabs have yielded to deciphering scholars; they boast of the ancient king’s war crimes: ‘Many of the captives I have taken and burned in a fire. Many I took alive. From some I cut off their hands to the wrists, from others I cut off their noses, ears and fingers; I put out the eyes of many of the soldiers. I burned their young men, women and children to death.’”—Mike Spencer Bown

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“We cannot beat the virus with silence or with lies. Only truth and a megaphone help in such fights.”—Nicholas A. Christakis

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“I would implore everybody who’s celebrating today to remember it’s good to be a humble winner. Remember when I was here four years ago? Remember how bad that felt? Well, half the country feels that way right now.”—Dave Chappelle

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“One thing that Trump never communicates, and cannot possibly communicate, is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony.”—Sam Harris

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“It’s ludicrous to compare Sweden to the United States. The former is a country of 10.2 million people with a cradle-to-grave social-welfare system, relatively few health problems . . . and a rule-abiding, collectively oriented citizenry. None of this resembles the United States, whose citizens have vastly higher rates of poverty, poor health, and other risk factors.”—Nicholas A. Christakis

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“Because being a man was finally just too sad—in spite of the perks, the lifetime membership benefits; and it got old, telling the joke about the hooker and the priest at the company barbeque.”—Tony Hoagland

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“If he could only show a part of what he feels when he finds out he is not a thousand miles from home. That he will not have to go into the country of desire alone.”—Tony Hoagland

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“People with many connections . . . tend to be infected earlier in the course of an epidemic than random people chosen from the same population. Because of their many social interactions, popular people have an increased risk of exposure.”—Nicholas A. Christakis

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“Language uses us the way that birds use sky, the way that seeds and viruses braid themselves into a mammal’s fur and hitchhike toward the future. When you say a word, you enter its vocabulary.”

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“It is autumn here. The defoliated trees look frightened at the edge of town, as if the train they missed had taken all their clothes. The whole world in unison is turning toward a zone of nakedness and cold. But me, I have this strange conviction that I am going to be born.”

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