The Index of Self-Destructive Acts Quotes

“haven’t thought about it in a long time, but Bill James developed a stat. It adds up balks, hit batsmen, wild pitches, errors—all the things a pitcher does that are entirely in his control, that don’t require the batter to do anything at all. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“Procrastination had always seemed to Waxworth an obvious cognitive failure, either an inability to measure the passage of time or an overvaluing of the present relative to the future. Something more than the daily churn or the pressure of print kept him from this work. Strange thoughts distracted him whenever he sat down to it. He thought about Margo Doyle’s question: Haven’t you ever been transported by your wife? He couldn’t precisely remember his answer, which was something about poetry, about feeling one thing while knowing another, stuff he didn’t believe at all. She’d gotten”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“His party had given up on liberalism. They didn’t even use the word anymore. They said instead that they were “progressives,” as if any movement into the future was necessarily better than the status quo. The Left had an illiberal streak that no one seemed willing to talk about, and Frank could see it in his colleagues’ reaction when he refused to join in the rending of garments over advocating invasion.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“He trusted that Margo knew of Richard Harvey’s reputation for romantic entanglements with his students. (Romantic Entanglements was the title of Richard’s groundbreaking study of Shelley; the kind of men Margo dated were never too jealous to hit on the proper allusion.)”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“Print, he’d heard Blakeman tell someone, was where quality went to die.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“The present couldn’t actually change the past, but it could change the meaning of the past, which amounted to the same thing.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“A teenager’s joke that quickly stopped being funny but was repeated out of a kind of loyalty and eventually became funny again through the sheer power of this repetition”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“It is the liberal’s nature not to be disappointed by human failures but to remain hopeful. Not for us the tragic view of life. “We’ll get ’em next year” is the liberal’s natural rallying cry.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“Men like Richard and her father used ideas rather than facts as their raw materials. They were interested in testing their notions against hers, arguing them out. They listened, but mostly they were listening for a point they could pick up and make their own. Attentive but impatient, they waited with arms outstretched for her to pass the conversational baton.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“On the train, he took out The Crack of the Bat and started looking over it. The book included one of Doyle’s most famous columns, about how growing up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan had been “training for liberalism”: It is the liberal’s nature not to be disappointed by human failures but to remain hopeful. Not for us the tragic view of life. “We’ll get ’em next year” is the liberal’s natural rallying cry.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“I’ve got news for you,” Frank said. “What you see as just extraneous bits of jingoism are secretly the purpose of the entire event. The game exists to be a ritual in the nation’s civic”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“When it came to ethics, he was a strict consequentialist. Pacifism as an absolute stance didn’t make sense to him.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“Why do we need to tell lies about the world in order to make it beautiful? What an impoverishing idea.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“But polls couldn’t capture a mood. For that you needed to look around a bit.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“For centuries, the primary limit on human knowledge had been record-keeping. We couldn’t collect all the facts.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“He tried to attend to the facticity of things.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“If they had faith in anything, it was in the power of human reason to make the world a better place.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“As Kierkegaard tells us, life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“She had all the neuroses that came from growing up rich, plus the added neurosis that only some had: the feeling that you weren’t quite entitled to your unhappiness. The Anxiety of Affluence, Richard had jokingly called it.”
― Christopher R. Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts