“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

“As children of the Lord we should strive every day to rise to a higher level of personal righteousness in all of our actions.”

“If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language.”

“The difficulty with Poe is not figuring out which of his stories rise to the level required of this collection, but rather which of his stories to exclude from it.”

“Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.”

“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”