“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity”

“…about how she had seemingly overnight suffered a sudden and anomalous gigantism in her right breast, which she referred to as a titty; she had an almost parodic Québecois accent and described the ‘titty’s’ presenting history and possible diagnoses for almost twenty minutes before I was rolled away.”

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

“Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.”

“I Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite if school, not because of it -- which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.”

“The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself.”

“Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside of me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head. What you don't yet know are the stakes of this struggle. In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand these stakes, and to see that the liberal arts cliche about "teaching you how to think" was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth. "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”