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.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, r. May & Aug. 2024

 Page 4 Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health. Most of us are healthy most of the time, and most of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time.

Page 6 The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.

Page 12 This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Page 41 The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people.

Page 46 Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Page 55 The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.

Page 106 Characteristics of System 1 generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions

Page 126 My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table. The psychologists Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler proposed more subtle ways to resist the anchoring effect in negotiations. They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor. The instruction to activate System 2 was successful. For example, the anchoring effect is reduced or eliminated when the second mover focuses his attention on the minimal offer that the opponent would accept, or on the costs to the opponent of failing to reach an agreement. In general, a strategy of deliberately “thinking the opposite” may be a good defense against anchoring effects, because it negates the biased recruitment of thoughts that produces these effects.

Page 169 The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better.

Page 191 Similarly, if you use childhood achievements to predict grades in college without regressing your predictions toward the mean, you will more often than not be disappointed by the academic outcomes of early readers and happily surprised by the grades of those who learned to read relatively late. The corrected intuitive predictions eliminate these biases, so that predictions (both high and low) are about equally likely to overestimate and to underestimate the true value. You still make errors when your predictions are unbiased, but the errors are smaller and do not favor either high or low outcomes.

Page 220 The main point of this chapter is not that people who attempt to predict the future make many errors; that goes without saying. The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

Page 256 Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

Page 281 And you also know that your attitudes to gains and losses are not derived from your evaluation of your wealth. The reason you like the idea of gaining $100 and dislike the idea of losing $100 is not that these amounts change your wealth. You just like winning and dislike losing—and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning.

Page 302 Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.

Page 316 When Amos and I began our work on prospect theory, we quickly reached two conclusions: people attach values to gains and losses rather than to wealth, and the decision weights that they assign to outcomes are different from probabilities.

Page 338 I sympathize with your aversion to losing any gamble, but it is costing you a lot of money. Please consider this question: Are you on your deathbed? Is this the last offer of a small favorable gamble that you will ever consider? Of course, you are unlikely to be offered exactly this gamble again, but you will have many opportunities to consider attractive gambles with stakes that are very small relative to your wealth. You will do yourself a large financial favor if you are able to see each of these gambles as part of a bundle of small gambles and rehearse the mantra that will get you significantly closer to economic rationality: you win a few, you lose a few.

Page 339 The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotional benefits of broad framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequency with which they check how well their investments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains.

Page 342 The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing that inevitably creates conflicts of interest when the individual acts as an agent on behalf of an organization.

Page 344 To implement this rational behavior, System 2 would have to be aware of the counterfactual possibility: “Would I still drive into this snowstorm if I had gotten the ticket free from a friend?” It takes an active and disciplined mind to raise such a difficult question.

Page 367 Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.

Page 371 If the person who lost tickets were to ask for my advice, this is what I would say: “Would you have bought tickets if you had lost the equivalent amount of cash? If yes, go ahead and buy new ones.”

Page 374 “They will feel better about what happened if they manage to frame the outcome in terms of how much money they kept rather than how much they lost.” “Let’s reframe the problem by changing the reference point. Imagine we did not own it; how much would we think it is worth?” “Charge the loss to your mental account of ‘general revenue’—you will feel better!”

Page 381 Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

Page 390 Many point out that they would not send either themselves or another amnesic to climb mountains or trek through the jungle—because these experiences are mostly painful in real time and gain value from the expectation that both the pain and the joy of reaching the goal will be memorable.

Page 396 Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one’s life than on the experience of living. Educational attainment is an example. More education is associated with higher evaluation of one’s life, but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress. On the other hand, ill health has a much stronger adverse effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation. Living with children also imposes a significant cost in the currency of daily feelings—reports of stress and anger are common among parents, but the adverse effects on life evaluation are smaller.

Page 396 Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.

Page 397 higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. There is suggestive evidence in favor of this idea: priming students with the idea of wealth reduces the pleasure their face expresses as they eat a bar of chocolate!

Page 397 Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of their experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely.

Page 411 Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not. Econs are rational by this definition, but there is overwhelming evidence that Humans cannot be. An Econ would not be susceptible to priming, WYSIATI, narrow framing, the inside view, or preference reversals, which Humans cannot consistently avoid.

Endure by Alex Hutchinson, r. Feb. 2024

 Location 2999 Burke and others published a pair of studies in 2016 using a protocol dubbed “sleep low,” which involved a high-quality carbohydrate-fueled workout in the late afternoon, followed by a carbohydrate-free dinner; then, the next morning, a carbohydrate-depleted moderate workout before breakfast. Repeating this cycle just three times, for a total of six days, produced a 3 percent improvement in 20-kilometer cycling times.

Location 3188 Pacing, in Tucker’s formulation, is the process of comparing the effort you feel at any given point in a race to the effort you expect at that stage—an internal template that you develop and fine-tune from experience. If the start of a race feels like a 10 out of 20 effort on the Borg scale, and you expect to hit 20 by the end, then halfway through the race the effort should feel like a 15. If, instead, you’re at 16 halfway through the race, you’ll feel a powerful urge to slow down—even though you’re still far from the max of 20.

Location 3333 I thought back to what Marcora had told me about the difference between effort and pain. We often think of races as “painful,” but physical pain is completely distinct from the sense of effort—the struggle to keep going against a mounting desire to stop—that usually limits race speed.

Location 3410 The goal, Paulus explains, is to cultivate “non-judgmental self-awareness”: for a marathoner, leg pain and shortness of breath become neutral sources of information, to be used for pacing, rather than emotionally charged warnings to panic about. “You learn to monitor how your body actually feels, while suspending judgment about it,” he says.

Location 4070 The answers to important questions are often elusive, but in the process of chasing them, we sometimes get a better handle on which questions are worth asking.

Location 4082 You can certainly improve your physiological fitness, albeit by margins that get ever smaller the longer you train. And there may also be shortcuts to upping your brain game, like zapping your motor cortex. But I’m not sure that’s any more satisfying than wearing faster shoes. The ultimate goal, it seems to me, is to dig deeper of your own volition—to be better than you were by leaving the tank a little emptier. That’s why, no matter what future research tells us about neat ideas like brain stimulation, the best answer I have for that nagging question about how to alter your limits is still humble, unsexy self-talk.

The Great Unknown by Marcus du Sautoy, r. Apr. 2020

p. 21 "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing." - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

p. 56 At least with the future we can wait and see what the outcome of chaotic equations produces. But trying to work backward and understand what state our planet was in to produce the present is equally if not more challenging. The past, even more than the future, is probably something we can never truly know.

p. 75 "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer

p. 172 The problem, [Herbert McCabe] believed, is that religion far too often commits idolatry by trying to engage too personally with this concept of God. The trouble is that an undefined, unknowable, transcendent concept is too abstract for many to engage with. It can't offer the sort of consolation that many seek. So perhaps it is inevitable that God's potency depends on becoming a little less transcendent, and more tangible.

p. 229 "The universe is not constructed for our convenience. It's not an exercise in the philosophy of science. It's too bad if we can't find these things out. In fact, I'd be very suspicious if all these fundamental questions happened to be answerable by what we're doing.

p. 318 Consciousness allows the brain to take part in mental time travel. You can think of yourself in the past and even project yourself into the future. But at the same time, being aware of your own existence means having to confront the inevitability of your demise. Death-awareness is the price we pay for self-awareness. That is why Gallup believes that later in life chimpanzees prefer to lose their ability to be conscious of themselves. Could dementia in humans play a similar role, protecting aging humans from the painful recognition of their impending death?

p. 331 Many neuroscientists now speak of consciousness as being similar to the wetness of water. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon in the sense that it is a higher-level property of a system triggered by neuronal activity happening at a lower level. But that doesn't really explain what this higher-level thing really is.

p. 333 "What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind." - The Dhammapada

p. 417 I wonder, though, whether, as I come to the end of my exploration, I have changed my mind about declaring myself an atheist. With my definition of a God as that which we cannot know, to declare myself an atheist would mean that I believe there is nothing we cannot know. I don't believe that anymore. In some sense I think I have proved that this God does exist. The challenge now is to explore what quality this God has. My statement about being an atheist is really just a response to the rather impoverished version of God offered by most religions and cultures. I reject the existence of a supernatural intelligence that intervenes in the evolution of the universe and in our lives. This is a rejection of the God that people assign strange properties to - such as compassion, wisdom, love - that make no sense when it comes to the idea that I am exploring.

p. 426 Studies into consciousness suggest boundaries beyond which we cannot go. Our internal worlds are potentially unknowable to others. But isn't that one of the reasons we write and read novels? It is the most effective way to give others access to that internal world.-

How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen, r. Mar. 2018

p. 8 …the brain is not an album in which memories are stored discretely like unchanging photographs. A memory is, instead… a “temporary constellation” of activity…

p. 10 The organ with which we observe and make sense of the universe is, by a comfortable margin, the most complex object we know of in that universe.

p. 11 Alzheimer’s is a disease of classically “insidious onset.” Since even healthy people become more forgetful as they age, there’s no way to pinpoint the first memory to fall victim to it.

p. 32 Plato’s description of writing, in the Phadreus, as a “crutch of memory” seems to me fully accurate: I couldn’t tell a clear story of my father without those letters. But, where Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper. My mother’s letters are truer and more complete than my self-absorbed and biased memories; she’s more alive to me in the written phrase “he NEEDS distractions!” than in hours of videotape or stacks of pictures of her.

p. 35 There’s no way to know if he recognized my voice, but within minutes of my arrival his blood pressure climbed to 120/90. I worried then, worry even now, that I made things harder for him by arriving: that he’d reached the point of being ready to die but was ashamed to perform such a private or disappointing act in front of one of his sons.

p. 43 In the last few decades, many judges and scholars have chosen to speak of a “zone of privacy,” rather than a “sphere of liberty,” but this is a shift in emphasis, not in the substance: not the making of a new doctrine but the repackaging and remarketing of an old one.

p. 52 Walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday night, I feel bereft. All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs and Nokias with preoccupied expressions, as if probing a sore tooth, or adjusting a hearing aid, or squeezing a pulled muscle; personal technology has begun to look like a personal handicap. All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy.

p. 65 Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time increments of cultural change: How to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

p. 66 The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading. I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feeling of fear and estrangement into the construction of her. If I know her only through the video of Desperate Characters, (Shirly MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the surficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.

p. 71 In publishing circles, confessions of doubt are widely referred to as “whining” – the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic, and self-serving in writers who don’t sell, ungracious in writers who do. For people as protective of their privacy and as fiercely competitive as writers are, mute suffering would seem to be the safest course. However sick with foreboding you feel inside, it’s best to radiate confidence and to hope that it’s infectious.

p. 77 Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it’s a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.

p. 82 Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive – my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weight book.’ Redaing that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath adds, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.”

p. 85 Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker, has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary best-seller list are vapid, predictable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predictable, and badly written. Lane’s essays usefully destroy the notion of a golden pre-television age when the American masses had their noses stuck in literary masterworks; he makes it clear that this country’s popular tastes have become no worse in a half a century.

p. 107 His shirt darkens with sweat as we walk through the long morning shadows, through the vacancy of a residential neighborhood emptied by the morning rush hour. Children who stay home sick and writers who stay home working know this emptiness. It brings a sense of estrangement from the world, and for me that sense has always been sharpened and confirmed by the sound of a mailman’s footsteps approaching and receding. To be a mailman is to inhabit this emptiness for hours, to disturb five hundred abandoned lawns, one after another.

p. 160 There’s no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: they don’t do it because they’re slaves to nicotine. My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured. The mentally ill and the indigent are also members of this class. We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine, suspended in an aerosol of hydrocarbons and nitrosamines, because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure-bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for the structuring might be “self-medication”; another might be “coping.”

p. 165 I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present. For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing, here in the anxious mid-nineties, the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images – a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers – feels apocalyptic.

p. 166 Sanders’s generalizations about “young people today” apply only to the segment of the population (admittedly a large one) that lacks the money or the leisure to inoculate its children against the worst ravages of electronic media.

p. 167 If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask “Do we need this?” or “How might it harm us?”

p. 171 “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”

p. 172 Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state. Here is his description of his initial engagement with a novel: “I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.”

p. 173 Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.

p. 178 But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

p. 204 Obsolescence is the leading product of our national infatuation with technology, and I now believe that obsolescence is not a darkness but a beauty: not perdition but salvation. The more headlong the progress of technological development, the greater the volume of obsolete detritus. And the detritus isn’t simply material. It’s angry religion, resurgent countercultural ideologies, the newly unemployed, the eternally unemployable. These are the fiction writer’s guarantee that he or she will never be alone. Obsolescence is our legacy.

p. 231 Lowering one’s eyes is a sign of deference – I learned this very early on. But it’s also, of course, a way of not seeing.

p. 249 There’s something medieval Christian about The Recognitions. The novel is like a huge landscape painting of modern New York, peopled with hundreds of doomed but energetic little figures…

p. 258 Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.

p. 294 As I sat watching football and listened to the barren wind, I believed that the reason I couldn’t stand to look at my old house was that I was done with it: that I didn’t want to feel the inevitable nothing when I went inside it, I didn’t want to have to blame an innocent house for still existing after its meaning had been emptied out.