151 Quotes

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. ”
― Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

“Adolescent youths cry out for us to help them contextualize their life experiences.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys Into Exceptional Men

“The real perfect storm fueling the opioid epidemic had been the collapse of work, followed by the rise in disability and its parallel, pernicious twin: the flood of painkillers pushed by rapacious pharma companies and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another. Declining workforce participation wasn't just a rural problem anymore; it was everywhere, albeit to a lesser degree in areas with physicians who prescribed fewer opioids and higher rates of college graduates. As Monnat put it: "When work no longer becomes an option for people, what you have at the base is a structural problem, where the American dream becomes a scam." She likened the epidemic's spread not to crabgrass but a wildfire: "If the economic collapse was the kindling in this epidemic, the opiates were the spark that lit the fire." And the helicopters were nowhere in sight.”
― Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

“Certainly, patients may be noncompliant, but how relevant is the notion of compliance in rural Haiti? Doctors may instruct their patients to eat well. But the patients will 'refuse' if they have no food. They may be told to sleep in an open room and away from others, and here again they will be 'noncompliant' if they do not expand and remodel their miserable huts. They may be instructed to go to a hospital. But if hospital care must be paid for in cash, as is the case throughout Haiti, and the patients have no cash, they will be deemed 'grossly negligent'.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor