The Circle

by Dave Eggers

“Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Individually you don’t know what you’re doing collectively.

We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day?

Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.