“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

If 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.

“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

“We invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.”—Johann Hari

“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

“It seems incredible to us today, but fifty years ago, there was very little obesity in the Western world.”—Johann Hari

“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

“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

The 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.

“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

“When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others.”—David Brooks