“All water is a part of other water. Cloud talks to lake; mist speaks quietly to creek. Lake says something back to cloud, and cloud listens. No water is lonely water.”—Tony Hoagland
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“We ourselves aren’t thinking about the future anymore. What we want is to calm time down, to get time in a good mood, to make time feel wanted. We just want to give time many homemade gifts, covered with fingerprints and kisses.”—Tony Hoagland
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“Death is something that always has to be enclosed by an elaborate set of explanations. It is an ancient litigation, this turning of horror into stories, and it is a lonely piece of work, trying to turn the stories back into horror, but somebody has to do it—especially now that God has reverted to a state of fire.”—Tony Hoagland
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“You don’t know how things will turn out. You don’t even notice how they have turned out after they have turned out that way.”—Tony Hoagland
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“Are straight women really still doomed to choose between a foolish, futile quest for Mr. Right and a mad dash after the equally elusive Mr. Anyone at All?”—Moira Weigel
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“Love itself was not what I expected. It was not the end of a search but the beginning. In love, I began to feel desire as a movement in me that reached outward, yearning to act upon the world.”—Moira Weigel
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“In the hospital waiting room, seated in my plastic chair, I think about Leonard Cohen and start quietly to cry. I’m glad no one is watching, because I can see the childish indulgence of it all—the displacement of my personal self-pity onto the cadaverous Canadian singer whom one critic called “the world’s leading producer of songs advocating suicide.’”—Tony Hoagland
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“If Fun Fearless Feminism failed to address the concerns of so many women, then what explains its success? It was market-friendly. This brand of feminism can be used to sell almost anything.”—Moira Weigel
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“The male blue-footed booby does a mean mating dance, but he does not date. Neither did Americans until around 1900. Since then, experts have constantly declared that dating was dead or dying. The reason is simple. The ways people date change with the economy. You could even say dating is the form that courtship takes in a society where it takes place in a free market.”—Moira Weigel
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“By outward measures, I was a bona fide sex writer who sang the feminist gospel of sexual pleasure—but my personal life made me feel like an impostor.”—Tracy Clark-Flory, Want Me (2021)
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“Any institutions, norms, beliefs, or psychological inclinations that increase the flow of ideas among diverse minds or open up more opportunities for fortune to show us the way will energize innovation.”—Joseph Henrich
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The higher the international corruption index for a delegation’s home country, the more tickets those UN delegations accumulated in Manhattan.
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“Five years ago, Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova was an obscure and unpublished novelist, with an unusual background.”
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“The kidnappers send out a photograph of the hostage, grimacing, holding up a newspaper from yesterday. They call this ‘proof of life.’ It means the captive is still alive.”—Tony Hoagland
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“Success is the worst possible thing that could happen to a man like you,” she said, “because the shiny shoes, and flattery and the self-lubricating slime of affluence would mean you’d never have to face your failure as a human being.”
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“Self-love is a good thing, but self-awareness is more important. You need to, once in a while, go: Oh, I’m kind of an asshole. You have to have that thought once in a while, or you’re a psychopath.”—Louis CK
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“First we made her into an object of desire, then into an object of contempt. Now we want to turn her into an object of compassion? Are you sure we know what the hell we’re doing?”—Tony Hoagland, “Poor Britney Spears”
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“What matters is finding the perfect partner—not the perfect person. It’s not about lowering your standards—it’s about maturing and having reasonable expectations. . . . I wanted men to accept me for who I was, but I wasn’t willing to accept them for who they were. . . . I’d always focused on what compromises I’d have to make to be with someone else, but I didn’t seriously consider the second part—that being with me wouldn’t be winning the lottery either.”
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“Have you ever noticed anyone flushing after drinking a relatively small amount of alcohol? Who was it?”—Joseph Henrich
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“Wisdom isn’t scarce; it never was. The average bookshelf of a Psych major named James at Cumberland Community College will yield all the wisdom that was ever necessary to end war, teach kindness, face death, sprout honesties like flowers, fashion codes of understanding for a working world.”—Tony Hoagland
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