“Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental — less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word 'question'.”

“In the long term everyone traffics in foregone conclusions, and in the short term they just get drunk. This is the way it has always been. Some half-assed ambiguity masquerading as mystery is all anybody's really looking for.”

“Die Judenfrage,' it used to be called, even by Jews. 'The Jewish Question.' I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish 'problem.' Again, the word 'solution' can be as neutral as the words 'question' or 'problem,' but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.”

“Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries.”

“I didn’t say you’re a bad person. I just don’t like being a foregone conclusion for the sole reason of having a vagina.”

“He (The 4th Doctor) concludes, as befits his Bohemian heroism, that the quest itself fulfils the quest - to travel is better than to arrive, and taking part is more triumphant than winning.”