“To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.”—David Whyte
Read More“The perfect gift may be tiny and inexpensive, but accompanied by a note that moves the recipient; the perfect gift may be enormous, extravagant, expensive and jaw-dropping as a courageous act of flamboyance and devil-may-care love, but to give appropriately always involves a tiny act of courage, a step of coming to meet, of saying I see you, and appreciate you.”—David Whyte
Read More“Unrequited love is the love human beings experience most of the time. The very need to be fully requited may be to turn from the possibilities of love itself. Men and women have always had difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes.”—David Whyte, Consolations (2020)
Read More“Even the most solitary writer needs a reader, the most Machiavellian mobster a trusted lieutenant, the most independent candidate a voter.”—David Whyte
Read More“Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationships: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honourable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love, and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent–child relationship.”—David Whyte
Read More“There’s a strong case to be made that chemical intoxication has not outlived its functional role, and there are plenty of reasons we should continue to get drunk.”—Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way Into Civilization (2021)
Read MoreIf you’re normal, sooner or later, you’re going to fall in love with the person you’re sleeping with, or they’re going to fall in love with you, whether you like it or not.
Read MoreWe have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.
Read More“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.”
Read More“For now, he is certain of his act; now he is like a man destroying a religion, or hacking at the root of a tree.”—Tony Hoagland
Read More“People convinced of an imagined impending apocalypse can do a great deal of real harm.”—Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021)
Read More“My mother lived to be ninety-two. . . . She was complicated, and my relationship with her was never easy, but it was interesting, which was probably better for me, all in all. With a little difficulty we finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship. Then she started watching Fox News.”—Marilynne Robinson
Read More“Like free public grade schools, public pools were part of an ‘Americanizing’ project intended to overcome ethnic divisions and cohere a common identity—and it worked. A Pennsylvania county recreation director said, ‘Let’s build bigger, better and finer pools. That’s real democracy. Take away the sham and hypocrisy of clothes, don a swimsuit, and we’re all the same.’”
Read More“There is a beauty at the center of American culture which, when it is understood, is expressed in a characteristic eloquence. Every new articulation renews the present life of the country and enriches historic memory to the benefit of future generations. Barack Obama speaks this language, a rare gift.”
Read More“Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.”
Read More“Human beings haven’t come that far in their effort to subdue the body, and we still walk around like zombies in our dying, burning world, able to do little more than fight, and fuck, and crow: something Lawrence wrote about in such a manner as to make us seem magnificent.”—Tony Hoagland
Read More“To those with the vision of the anointed, it is such evils as poverty, crime, war, and injustice which require explanation. To those with the tragic vision, however, it is prosperity, law, peace, and such justice as we have achieved, which require not only explanation but constant efforts, trade-offs, and sacrifices, just to maintain them at their existing levels, much less promote their enhancement over time.”—Thomas Sowell
Read More“Although businesses produce most of the things that make up the standard of living in a modern society, there is remarkably little interest among the intelligentsia in a causal analysis of the things that promote or inhibit the production of output, on which everyone’s economic well-being ultimately depends.”—Thomas Sowell
Read More“In the early twentieth century especially, parents were not sending their children to school to become guinea pigs in someone else’s social experiments to use education as a means of subverting existing values in order to create a new society based on new values, those of a self-anointed elite, more or less behind the backs of parents, voters and taxpayers.”—Thomas Sowell
Read More“We have surrendered thought to ideology. Every question is for all purposes the same question, every answer the same answer. Why has anyone done anything? Self-interest. This is true of the whole species, but it is most emphatically true of Americans. Where in all this is wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity? To think in such terms is naïve.”—Marilynne Robinson
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