The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, r. Feb. 2026

 p. 6 Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and – as I will show – unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness – perpetually – to managing what became their online brand.

p. 73 As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all "triggers" from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

p. 120 In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." So what was the opportunity cost to children and adolescents when they started spending six, or eight, or perhaps even 16 hours each day interacting with their devices? Might they have exchanged any parts of life that were necessary for healthy human development?

p. 139 The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.

p. 152 Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one's value as an individual with unique skills. Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency [striving to individuate and expand the self] while girls and women are more focused on communion [striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others]

p. 194 A central concept for Durkheim was anomie, or normlessness – an absence of stable and widely shared norms and rules. Durkheim was concerned that modernity, with its rapid and disorienting changes and its tendency to weaken the grip of traditional religions, fostered anomie and thus suicide. He wrote that when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don't feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious. That, I believe, is what has happened to Gen Z. They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later [rather than a network with "a daily tornado of memes, fads, and ephemeral mircrodramas, played out among a rotating cast of millions of bit players].

p. 203 "collective effervescence"

p. 204 family rituals such as a digital Sabbath (one day per week with reduced or no digital technology, combined with enjoyable in-person activities)

p. 206 Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.

p. 207 If we want to experience stillness and silence, and if we want to develop focus and a sense of unified consciousness, we must reduce the flow of stimulation into our eyes and ears. We must find ample opportunities to sit quietly, whether that is in meditation, or by spending more time in nature, or just by looking out a car window and thinking on a long drive, rather than always listening to something, or (for children in the back seat) watching videos the whole way.

p. 209 Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world's wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers. Many users may believe that the implicit carrots and sticks built into platforms like Instagram don't affect them, but it's hard not to be affected unconsciously.

p. 253 Unstructured free play addresses – head-on – making friends, learning empathy, learning emotional regulation, learning interpersonal skills, and greatly empowers students by helping them find a healthy place in their school community – all while teaching them life's most important skills like creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction, perseverance, and social skills.  

p. 260 Human childhood evolved in savannas and forests, alongside streams and lakes. When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games. Abundant research shows that time in natural settings benefits children's social, cognitive, and emotional development, and these benefits matter even more as young people are increasingly ensconced in the virtual world and as their anxiety levels continued to rise.

p. 269 As for your own interactions with your child, they don't have to be "optimized." You don't have to make every second special or educational. It's a relationship, not a class. But what you do often matters far more than what you say, so watch your own phone habits. Be a good role model who is not giving continuous partial attention to both the phone and the child.

p. 274 Bonus points for any [monthlong teen summer camp] that promises to not post pictures every day on its website. Summer camp is a great opportunity for parents and children to get out of the habit of constant contact and, especially for parents, constant reassurance that their kids are okay.

p. 280 6. Talk with your preteen about the risks [of social media], and listen to their thoughts. Even without a social media account, all children will encounter age-inappropriate content online. Exposure to pornography is virtually certain. Talk with your preteens about the risks inherent in posting public content or sharing personal information online, including sexting and cyberbullying. Ask them what problems they see in their peers' online habits, and ask them how they think they can avoid such problems themselves. 

p. 281 You have to let go online eventually. But if you can keep the quantity of online time lower and the quality higher in this long period of childhood and early adolescence (ages 6-13), you'll make room for more real-world engagement, and you'll buy time for your child's brain to develop better self-control and less fragmented attention.

p. 281 FOR PARENTS OF TEENS AGES 13-18 (HIGH SCHOOL) [a list of ] More (and Better) Experience in the Real World: 1. Increase their mobility. 2. Rely more on your teen at home. 3. Encourage your teen to find a part-time job. 4. Find ways for them to nurture and lead. 5. Consider a high school exchange program. 6. Better thrills in nature.

p. 287 As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage them to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from older adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness program, and a gap year.

p. 289 ...the radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman: a phone-based existence.

p. 290 In part 4, I offered dozens of suggestions, but the four foundational reforms are: 1. No smartphones before high school. 2. No social media before 16. 3. Phone-free schools. 4. Far mare unsupervised play and childhood independence.

Flesh by David Szalay, r. Feb. 2026

p. 128 "So you need to fit in. You need to fit in with everything else in their lives. That's what they want. They're people with serious money and they want someone who fits in with everything else in their lives."

p. 83 He realizes that the thing that are so important to him – the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again – they just aren't important here. [as he looks out the window of the train, dusk becoming night and thus his own reflection, leaving the war in the Middle East and heading back home]

p. ??? Without that hour in the afternoon to look forward to, there is nothing to give the days any sense of purpose or meaning.

p. 162 There are those London summer days when summer seems muffled somehow, when a cool, humid grayness hangs in the park as he runs. Statues hold their positions.

p. 172 He lies there for another minute or two against the pillows, looking at the ceiling, which is discreetly studded with smoke detectors and other things, and wondering what will happen now.

p. 214 The difference is maybe that when he’s drunk he doesn’t care that he’s disconnected from things, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, whereas when he’s stoned it somehow does.

p. 256 On Christmas Eve he meets some Oxford friends for lunch in London. Afterward they go to a pub in Knightsbridge with an open fire. It’s one of those winter afternoon drinking sessions that merge into evening in a way that’s almost imperceptible as it’s happening. It’s just suddenly nine o’clock.

p. 278 There’s the distinctive quiet that follows the end of one of these [video calls], the restoration of a solitude that was anyway only partly dispelled by the presence of someone else on the laptop screen.

p. 289 The idea that his son is afraid of something, that he’s suffering in some way, and that there’s not much he can do about it is very hard for him to deal with. It’s just very painful to think about.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, r. Apr. 2020

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a tram. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.

"Hold on," he said, gripping my wrist. "Sure I loved her. But it wasn't that I wanted to touch her." And he added, without smiling: "Not that I don't think about that side of things. Even at my age, and I'll be sixty-seven January ten. It's a peculiar fact -- but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind more and more. I don't remember thinking about it so much even when I was a youngster and it's every other minute. Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that's why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden. Whenever I read in the paper about an old man disgracing himself, I know it's because of this burden.

"I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead."

That Monday in October, 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird. To start, we had Manhattans at Joe Bell's; and, when he heard of my good luck, champagne cocktails on the house. Later, we wandered toward Fifth Avenue, where there was a parade. The flags in the wind, the thump of military bands and military feet, seemed to have nothing to do with war, but to be, rather, a fanfare arranged in my personal honor.

She was forever on her way out, not always with Rusty Trawler, but usually, and usually, too, they were joined by Mag Wildwood and the handsome Brazilian, whose name was José Ybarra-Jaegar: his mother was German. As a quartet, they struck an unmusical note, primarily the fault of Ybarra-Jaegar, who seemed as out of place in their company as a violin in a jazz band. He was intelligent, he was presentable, he appeared to have a serious link with his work, which was obscurely governmental, vaguely important, and took him to Washington several days a week. How, then, could he survive night after night in La Rue, El Morocco, listening to the Wildwood ch-ch-chatter and staring into Rusty's raw baby-buttocks face? Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character. That would explain much; Holly's determination explains the rest.

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full- grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

"I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, r. Dec. 2019

p. 99 Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She was too eager to live herself.

p. 239 "You can't imagine what a pleasure this complete laziness is to me: not a thought in my brain - you might send a ball rolling through it!"

p. 241 Constantine Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. Words seemed to detract from the beauty of what he was looking at.

p. 261 Besides, painful as were for a mother the fear of illness, and sorrow at the appearance of evil tendencies in her children, those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.

p. 271 "Why does she talk French with the children?" he thought. "How unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it. Teach them French and deprive them of sincerity," thought he, not knowing that Dolly had considered the point over and over again and had decided that even to the detriment of their sincerity the children had to be taught French.

p. 308 One change Vronsky noticed in him was that quiet and permanent radiance which comes upon the faces of people who have succeeded and feel assured that everybody recognizes their success. Vronsky knew that kind of radiance, and noticed it at once on Serpukhovskoy's face.

p. 312 He had often before been joyfully conscious of his body, but had never loved himself, his own body, as he did now. It gave him pleasure to feel the slight pain in his strong leg, to be conscious of the muscles of his chest moving as he breathed.

p. 348 "I am working, I want to do something, and I had forgotten that it will all end in Death!" He sat on his bed in the dark, doubled his arms around his knees and thought, scarcely breathing from the mental strain. But the more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and there was no help for it. Yet, it was terrible, but true. "But I am still alive: what am I to do now? What am I to do?"

p. 394 "What is the use of arguing? No one ever convinces another." "Yes, you are quite right," said Levin, "for the most part, people argue so warmly only because they cannot make out what it is that their opponent wants to prove."

p. 395 He had experienced the fact that sometimes in the middle of a discussion one understands what it is that one's opponent likes, and suddenly likes it oneself, and immediately agrees with him, when all proofs become superfluous and unnecessary. Sometimes the reverse happens; one at last mentions the thing one likes, for the sake of which one has been devising arguments, and if this is said well and sincerely, one's opponent suddenly agrees and ceases to dispute. That was what he wanted to express.

p. 447 He thought she was prettier than ever: not that those flowers, the veil, or the dress ordered from Paris enhanced her beauty in any way, but because, despite all the carefully planned richness of her attire, the look on her sweet face and lips was still that look of innocent truthfulness.

p. 474 He could work neither when he was too indifferent nor when he was too highly roused and saw everything too distinctly. There was only one stage between calmness and inspiration, at which work was possible, and today he was too excited.

p. 484 "She takes no interest in our work, in the farm, in peasants, or in music, though she is quite good at that, or in books. She does nothing and is quite content." In his heart he blamed her, but he did not understand that she was preparing herself for a period of activity which was inevitably coming, when at one and the same time she would be her husband's wife, the mistress of the house, and a bearer, nurturer, and educator of her children. He did not understand that, but she knew it instinctively; and while getting ready for her gigantic task she did not reproach herself for the moments of careless and happy love that she now enjoyed while building her nest for the future.

p. 677 "You talk of moral training! You can't imagine how difficult that is! You have hardly mastered one fault when another crops up and there is a fresh struggle. One must have the support of religion - you remember our talk about that? ... No father relying on his own strength, without that support, could educate a child.

p. 731 Before any definite step can be taken in a household, there must be either complete division or loving accord between husband and wife. When their relations are indefinite it is impossible for them to make any move. Many families continue for years in their old ruts, hated by both husband and wife, merely because there is neither complete discord nor harmony. Both for Vronsky and for Anna life in Moscow... was intolerable.

p. 775 "I was so busy that I did not know when I could tear myself away. And you, as usual," said he, smiling, "are enjoying tranquil happiness outside the currents in your peaceful shallows."

p. 779 Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is. Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably.

p. 789 "If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence - a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect. It is exactly this I know and that we all know. What greater miracle could there be than that? Can I possibly have found the solution of everything? Have my sufferings really come to an end?"

Home Game by Michael Lewis, r. Sep. 2018

p. 24 One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the compulsion to have a purpose in life. People are forever asking why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer. The least naturally ambitious people can have ambition thrust upon them in this way. Once you've established yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly impossible to just go somewhere and screw off.

p. 26 "Assimilation" is just another word for acquiring a bit of the local status.

p. 73 The fact, as opposed to the theory, of life with a small child is an amoral system of bribes and blackmails. You do this for me, you get that. You don't do this for me, you don't get that. I've always assumed that if a small child has enough joy and love and stability in her life, along with intelligently directed bribes and blackmail, the rest will take care of itself.

p. 78 The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you don't want to, maybe especially when you don't want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. "Have you ever owned a dog?" he said. And that's the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation.

p. 101 How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.

p. 135 A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member. Occasionally that is me; more often it is someone else; and so I must remain vigilant, lest the pleasure of my own life be dampened by their unhappiness.

p. 163 After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It's only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, r. Jan. 2018

p. 10 Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no more. "I never liked that chair." This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Alfred. The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Enid's words filled him with such sorrow - he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal - that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep. (It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.)

p. 11 He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am-" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seem as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness...

p. 18 [His mother] had always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at here ha had no idea what she really looked like.

p. 69 But Denise left the kitchen an took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip's living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn't absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; an no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip's living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer on new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world...

p. 96 To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing: neither taking advantage of his good night's sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing.

p. 163 "You've gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we've gotten you. Things you also said you were 'very interested in' at the time." "This is different," Caleb pleaded. "This time I'm really, truly interested." Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father's acquiescence.

p. 186 What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic and egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed.

p. 259 It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions...

p. 263 If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

p. 276 There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

p. 279 And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.

p. 283 Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal - sight would be its soul.

p. 326 "And Ted's right on top of that, he things our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We've bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is whet he says, and he refuses to be a part of it."

p. 351 The protective sky was thinner in this country of northern water [off the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula]. Clouds ran in packs resembling furrows in a field, gliding along beneath the sky's enclosing dome, which was noticeably low. One approached Ultima Thule here. Green objects had red coronas. In the forests that stretched west to the limit of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air's supernal clarity, there was nothing local.

p. 477 The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break.

p. 555 As she left her parents' neighborhood [on foot in the frigid winter night], the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one [Christmas Eve], was a good hour for staring at a screen.

p. 555 She'd never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

p. 571 And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. the tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body - softer, more mortal and organic - than like a building.

p. 600 She had to tell him [her husband in the depths of Alzheimer's whom she visited every day], while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn't listen, she had to tell him.

Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, r. Nov. 2015

p. 106 I said one evening that all I really wanted in life was one full day in which there should be absolutely nothing I had to do.  Johnny: "Try jumping off the Empire State Building."

p. 140 All the doctors! - helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of Death. Johnny died at 11:02pm. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly.

p. 142 We said goodbye. But to anybody who ever know him, he is still alive, I do not mean merely that he lives in both of us or in the trees at Deerfield or in anything he touched truly, but that the influence, the impact, of a heroic personality continues to exert itself long after mortal bonds are snapped. Johnny transmits permanently something of what he was, since the fabric of the universe is continuous and eternal.

p. 145 Knowing [Johnny] and thinking of his stubborn refusal to accept defeat makes me believe that that spirit will live on. For such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand.

p. 173 Wednesday: Self analysis: About half time my conscious mind is either asleep or wandering off in space. This... accounts for procrastination etc. I am greatly overintrovert - caused by over-consciousness of what others think of me. Caused by my atheism (?).

p. 191 Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive! You can touch them - what a miracle! ...Your sons and daughters are live. Think of that- not dead but alive! Exult and sing. All parents who have lost a child will fell what I mean. Others, luckily, cannot. But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.

Life Before Life by Jim Tucker, r. Dec. 2015

p. 195 Science is very conservative, and its stability rests on the idea that new understandings of the world must fit in with the previous knowledge about it. Biologist E. O. Wilson has used the term "consilience" to describe this, the "jumping together" of knowledge when facts and theories from different areas link and form a common foundation of knowledge. As he says, "the explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another."

p. 224 The idea of the emotional connection, but not the roles, enduring across lifetimes can affect the way that parents look at their children, because it suggests that parents need to provide discipline for their children, not in a domineering or harsh way, but as guidance for fellow travelers. Children can be seen as equal partners sharing life's journey instead of inferior beings, even though they are partners that need direction and need to feel a sense of security that their parents are in control.

Although Of Course In The End You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky, r. Aug. 2015

All quotes are by David Foster Wallace unless noted

p. 3 As if how good a writer you are and how good a teacher you are have anything to do with each other. I don't think so. I know too many really good writers who are shitty teachers, and vice versa, to think that. I think that the teaching... well, the teaching has helped my own writing a lot...

p. 16 ...somebody who's writing, has part of their motivation to sort of I think impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There's an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something - much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it.

p. 36 My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.

p. 41 ...if the writer does his job right, what he basically does in remind the reader of how smart the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

p. 69 And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.

p. 85 The problem is [TV]'s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food.

p. 180 Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like - there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older. Who's written something, or won some tournament, that you particularly admire.

p. 199 Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what's coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything's going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won't in any way challenge you.

p. 203 I mean that's probably ultimately why novels and movies have it over short stories, as on art form. Is that if the heart of the short story is dishonest, there aren't enough of the little flashes to keep you going. Whereas in a novel or a movie, even if the central project doesn't work, there are often ten or fifteen great, great, great things.

p. 266 [On his landscape (outside Bloomington), the long fields] When the wind blows, you can see ripples, it's like water. It's like the ocean, except it's really green. I mean, it really is. Not so much here. But you get another mile south, where it's nothing but serious full-time farmland and farmhouses? Sort of calm, real pretty.

p. 290 Today's person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise you humanity in that kind of exchange? Versus fifty years ago, when the big thing was, I don't know that, havin' a house and a garden and driving ten miles to your light industrial job. And livin' and dyin' in the same town that you're in, and knowing what other towns looked like only from photographs and the occasional movie reel. I mean, there's just so much that seems different, and the speed with which it gets different is just...

p. 291 I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.

p. 294 Nice to have your borders redefined, though, by physical contact with another person... I'm not just a set of anxieties and ambitions. I'm a person confined to a limited range, realize your head is only a half-foot-long space, etc.   - David Lipsky on physical relations with your significant other

p. 307 It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, r. Sep. 2014

p. 3 Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.

p. 10 [Reminiscing] is what I do for a good long time. It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

p. 18 Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Was our friendship for the Langs born out of simple gratitude to this woman who had the kinds to call on a strange young wife stuck in a basement without occupation or friends? Was I that avid for praise, to feel so warm toward them both because the professed to like my story? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? Or did I (I hope I did) like Charity Lang on sight because she was what she was, open, friendly, frank, a little ribald as it turned out, energetic, interested, as full of vitality as her smile was full of light?

p. 43 I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

p. 46 But he won't talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?

p. 57 Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn't much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide.

p. 59 it is a fact that no child ever followed George Barnwell Ellis to his work, or aped his way with any tool. His routines are simply not imitable. He appears mistily and cheerfully at breakfast, and shortly disappears - in winter to his office or to the Divinity School, where a child would have a difficult time finding anything at all to do, and in summer up the path to his think house, which by his assumption and Aunt Emily's interdict is off limits to the young.

p. 88 "She's great, she's thoughtful, and loving, she's kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born - you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She's teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She's simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don't think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he's himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don't let me have an agenda every time I'm with him."

p. 89 But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship - parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars publica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.

p. 123 Some things that astonished Sally - hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry - could not dispel the impression I got of a complicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished…

p. 130 It seemed to me that nothing could do so much for a man as a good long jail sentence. To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing of doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve - who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

p. 157 While we were at it, we might have discussed the dangers inherent in conducting your life according to rules whimsically adopted from some book, and ignoring the testimony and experience of people around you.

p. 174 I said, "Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he's a ruminator. He should have been a literate gentleman farmer with a telescope in his backyard, and a big library, and all kinds of time to think." "A rustic Newton?" she flashed. "Where's his Principia?" There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. "Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?" I said. "We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's been enough of that."

p. 185 Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don't have to wash them.

p. 194 - Hallie, you've got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don't understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren't people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn't reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I'd be falsifying something I don't want to falsify.

p. 202 Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.

p. 237 "[Death]'s as natural as being born," she said, "and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there's an immortality of organic molecules that's absolutely certain. Don't you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we'll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I've had a wonderful life, I've loved every minute."

p. 263 For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it.

Barren Lives by Graciliano Ramos, r. Apr. 2014

p. 126

Now she wanted to know what the boys were going to do when they grew up.

"Herd cattle," was Fabiano's opinion.

Vitoria made a face of disgust, shaking her head in disagreement at the risk of causing the tin trunk to fall. Our Lady save them from such misfortune! Herd cattle! What an idea! They were going to a far country, where they would forget the brushland with its hills and hollows, its pebbles, its dry rivers, thorns, vultures, dying cattle, and dying people. They would never com back; they would resist the homesickness that attacks backlanders in green country. Were they to die of sadness for lack of thorns? They would settle down far away and would take on new ways.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, r. Feb. 2014

p. 52 At the time, she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

p. 114 Time passed in a peculiar manner which the autobiographer, with her now rather abundant experience of murdered afternoons, is able to identify as depressive (at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chock-full second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour)

p. 130 That next afternoon, in Room 21, in broad daylight, with the windows open and the faded curtains billowing, they laughed and cried and fucked with a joy whose gravity and innocence it fairly wrecks the autobiographer to think back on, and cried some more and fucked some more and lay next to each other with sweating bodies and full hearts and listened to the sighing of the pines. Patty felt like she'd taken some powerful drug that wasn't wearing off, or like she'd fallen into an incredibly vivid dream that she wasn't waking up from, except that she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn't a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past, a romance unlike any romance she'd imagined. Because Room 21! How could she have imagined Room 21? It was such a sweetly clean old-fashioned room, and Walter such a sweetly clean old-fashioned person. And she was 21 and could feel her 21ness in the young, clean, strong wind that was blowing down from Canada. Her little taste of eternity.

p. 156 The days were bright and long, the nights startlingly cool. Patty loved early summer in the north, it took her back to her first days in Hibbing with Walter. The crisp air and moist earth, the conifer smells, the morning of her life.

p. 184 "Mom, I make your life so easy for you. Do you have any idea how easy? I don't do drugs, I don't do any of the shit that Joey does, I don't embarrass you, I don't create scenes, I never did any of that---" "I know! And I am truly grateful for it." "OK, but then don't complain if I have my own life and my own friends and don't feel like suddenly rearranging everything for you. You get all the benefits of me taking care of myself, the least you can do is not make me feel guilty about it."

p. 362 "The reason the system can't be overthrown in this country," Walter said, "is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they're not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europeans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this county isn't rational. It's taking place on a level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it."

p. 390 He was alone with his body; and since, weirdly, he was his body, this meant he was entirely alone.

p. 464 He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat.

p. 476 They had a tacit trusting way with each other, a way that reminded Walter of his and Patty's way when they were very young, the way of a couple united as a front against the world; his eyes misted up at the sight of their wedding bands.

p. 490 "To me," Walter said, "the difference is that birds are only killing because they have to eat. They're not doing it angrily, they're not doing it wantonly. It's not neurotic. To me that's what makes nature peaceful. Things live or they don't live, but it's not all poisoned with resentment and neurosis and ideology. It's a relief from my own neurotic anger."

p. 559 And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind. "It's me," she said. "Just me." "I know," he said, and kissed her.