“On a slow news day, we hung suspended from meathooks, dangling over the abyss. On a fast news day, it was like we had swallowed all of NASCAR and were about to crash into the wall. Either way, it felt like something a dude named Randy was in charge of.”

— Patricia Lockwood, “No One Is Talking About This”

“The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.”

“Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.”

“What injures the hive, injures the bee.”

— Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

“In hell there is no mystery cause in mystery there is always hope.”

— Ali Smith, “How to Be Both”

“Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.”

— George Eliot, “Middlemarch”

“. . . there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”

“All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.”

— Ann Patchett, “Bel Canto”

“The British like to see their military history as a succession of scrapes — the Armada or the Battle of Britain, for example — in which they are outnumbered and outgunned and survive by guts and ingenuity. It seems to demonstrate a higher moral purpose. But much of the story of their empire is testament not to moral but to technological superiority. . . . As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Modern Traveller, published that year:

Whatever happens, we have got // The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

— Jeremy Paxman, Empire

“The financial needs of news companies mean that they cannot afford to advance ideas which wouldn’t very quickly be able to find favour with enormous numbers of people. An artist can make a decent living selling work to fifty clients; an author can get by with 50,000 readers, but a news organization cannot pay its bills without a following larger than the population of a good-sized metropolis. What levels of agreement, what suppression of idiosyncrasy and useful weirdness, will be required to render material sufficiently palatable to so many  . . . Wisdom, intelligence and subtlety of opinion tend not to be sprinkled through the population in handy blocks of 20 million people.”

— Alain de Botton, The News: A User’s Manual

 

“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

— David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”