William Deresiewicz

“There's no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they'd introduced me, I saw that there's a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don't. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.”

“I sentimenti sono anche il modo primo di conoscere un romanzo; e i romanzi sono il terreno di prova per conoscere il mondo, santuari dell'immaginazione dove affinare e mettere alla prova i nostri valori, le nostre scelte. I sentimenti sono lo strumento di lavoro dei romanzieri, i colori della loro tavolozza.”

“We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.”

“[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.”

“...Novels--which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices.”

“Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself”

“But it is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.”