"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."
— Italo Calvino

"“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”"
— Italo Calvino

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation"
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)

"Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Life itself is a quotation."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I never change, I simply become more myself."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me."
— Joyce Carol Oates

""Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed."
— Joyce Carol Oates (The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982)

"Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.

Ten True Things"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul."
— Miranda July