Wellness Nathan Hill Quotes

She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.

reality could be created by the stories you believed, and thus it was important to pick the right stories.

What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.

It is an odd feeling, to sense one’s aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.

And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.

Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future.

I-"Fuck. "Well, I am angry at you, Nathan." "Good." "So fucking angry." "Perfect.

And other people’s attention feels exhausting because their expectations come across as an impossible obligation.

So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking.

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

the perfect placebo, she suddenly understood, was choice. If you chose to do something, you would endure all manner of mistreatment and still tell yourself: This was the right choice.

Maybe the human heart was just that messy, and all romance was deeply precarious, and the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that’s what true love actually was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And maybe the only stories that had neat and certain conclusions were lies and fables and conspiracies. Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.

Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility.

Beyond all the poetry, beyond all the songs, love is this, my dear: it’s an expansion of the self. It’s when the boundaries of the self spread out to include someone else, and what used to be them now becomes you.

people revealed themselves constantly, but unconsciously, and in the very smallest of ways.

When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention. This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty, the illusion that he will never be hurt again.

This, it turned out, was the most savage, most hurtful thing about being a parent: it wasn’t just coming face-to-face with all your own shortcomings and inadequacies, but it was also seeing those shortcomings embodied in your child.

And now people were watching other people watching other people play video games. It was like a Darwin fish parade of sloth.

And what you do when you are making big mistakes is find other people to make them with you.

And didn’t Jack do the same thing? He needed Elizabeth so much, and that need was plainly suffocating her. He was so fearful of losing her that he’d choked the life right out of their marriage. Evelyn had tried to teach him this very lesson, a long time ago. She’d told him: When you cling too hard to what you want, you miss what’s really there.

Marriage, my dear, is a condition whereby you find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you’re willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life.

They are both in Chicago to become orphans

Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I believe you,’ and she smiles. She stretches. She touches his face, and makes it splendid.

His mourning was so fully woven into him that he wasn’t entirely sure who he was without it. It was an everyday weight, pulling him down to this one awful fact anytime he strayed too far from it:

It's an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landing, magically on one's feet, intact and triumphant.

Here, Elizabeth thought, was an answer for her strange new client. How could United Airlines make its customers happy with a below-average experience? By making the experience much, much worse, and making people voluntarily choose to endure it. This was the solution! Make the seats even narrower, the lines even longer, the competition for overhead space even more cutthroat—make it all famously bad and then tell people that they could avoid all of it and have a more or less normally below-average experience for a modest fee. Thus, if they knew beforehand that the experience would be dreadful but they didn’t pay the fee to avoid it, they would be less unhappy about the dreadful experience because, ultimately, they chose to have it. They did it to themselves. It

The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves. And this saddened him. He

This weird and precious and private family thing becomes something altogether new when alchemized by Facebook—it gains a second, uglier entendre. It becomes instrumental. Toby becomes a prop. The whole thing turns into an ad. Such is the inexorable mathematics of Facebook: whatever goes on Facebook just becomes more like Facebook.

What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind - it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp. ... Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime

This is a complicated web, Maria. We're tangled in it." "Then I suppose we'll continue to need a spider who can navigate the threads. You're the only person I can trust right now.

Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition.

Information overload is the new hungry lion.

everything she and Jack had done wrong in their long relationship. They did not solve their problems; they merely became accustomed to them.

Mostly I’m just tenacious,” she says. “I have a good brain supplemented by a better work ethic.

It was not comfortable, this feeling, but it was more comfortable than being alone. His psyche eagerly deformed reality to avoid that which it found intolerable.

When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention

That’s the thing about assholes—they are assholes unreflectively. No asshole thinks to himself: Yeah, that was a quality asshole move. No, they just are. They go around just being, in perfect clueless bliss.

But marriage promises consistency, certainty: you will be loved forever. And the moment we become certain of this is the moment it begins to slip away from us. Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.” “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

...certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain or you could choose to be alive.

And this happened all over, in every working group, idiosyncratic professors from two dozen academic departments all fighting for explicit mission-statement representation. So, in the end, it was pretty easy to understand why the mission statement came out looking the way it did: a compound-complex, multi-semicoloned, many-branching grammatical nightmare that forced the English department to stage a collective symbolic walkout when the faculty senate approved it. Since

Those explorers,” Evelyn said, “were looking for the one thing that didn’t grow, and so they didn’t notice all the things that did grow. It’s an important lesson. If you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what’s really there.

The stories were different, but the dominant aesthetic seemed about the same: both the church and the farmers market longed for a more pristine Earth, one as either God or nature originally intended, before humanity came along and fouled it all up.

The song was of that dance music subgenre that might as well be called “Look at Me I’m in a Club!” It was music that you heard in the club, about the club, on the subject of being seen in the club—basically up-tempo drunken solipsism, with sporadic sexual depravity.

I want to update it. I want to beta test new models. I want to break it and start all over. The way I think of it is: marriage is just a technology that was never quite future-proof. Like, it may have been a good tool in Victorian England or whatever. But for us? Now? Not so much. We have these twenty-first-century relationships running eighteenth-century software. So it’s glitchy and it crashes all the time. Typically with any technology we try to innovate and update and improve it, but with marriage we seem to refuse all progress. We’ve convinced ourselves that, actually, we like all those glitches.

There’s a term used to describe the microsecond after the big bang when the known universe grew from a microscopically small speck to an infinitely large expanse—the term is cosmic inflation, and that’s the expression they use to describe what their heads do on whippits, and what their hearts do when they’re together.

The trick, she knew, was being able to live more fully in your imagination. To reduce the mental gap between you and the person you would soon become. To tell a story about the future that was more compelling than the present, which was something Elizabeth seemed to have a special knack for. It was one of her superpowers.

There was so much you could decode about people if you watched them closely enough. This was what Elizabeth learned as she passed the time during so many lonely childhood lunches and recesses and study halls and solo homecoming dances: people revealed themselves constantly, but unconsciously, and in the very smallest of ways.

It was the ritual that was important—the acupuncturist’s thorough examination, the couple’s elaborate date, the mother’s comforting home remedy, the ceremonial mixing of the absinthe. It was in these observances that the placebo effect activated and materialized: the transubstantiation of belief into reality, of story into truth, a metaphor made flesh.

Marriage is a technology. And some technologies amplify human abilities, while other technologies restrict them. A lever is a technology that amplifies, while a lock is one that restricts. And all I want to do is turn marriage from a lock into a lever. I want it to enable me to occasionally experience that romantic NRE rush without feeling like a failed spouse.

immediately, how any task other than keeping Toby safe, keeping Toby healthy, seemed like a diversion, or an interruption. She understood with some remorse that if one of her childless friends insisted on coming over during bedtime for martinis and conversation, it wouldn’t feel exactly unwelcome, but it would feel a little irrelevant. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain but then stopping for tea. She realized that her old friends had not abandoned her, or at least had not done so in any volitional way; it was just that their attention had been seized, their love redirected, the purpose of each day reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.

Jack lay in bed wondering what he’d done wrong. Was it the “abandoned” comment? Was it the way he so aggressively defended himself after making the “abandoned” comment? Maybe it had nothing to do with the comment at all. Maybe he’d been too flirty with Kate, or too rude to Kyle. He played back the evening in his mind, reviewed everything he had said, searched for something to apologize for. He must have been in bed a full hour thinking about this before deciding that in the morning he would offer a sort of broad-based unspecific catchall apology and then use Elizabeth’s reaction to deduce what she was upset about in particular.

People are not experiencing the world with peace and tranquility. Our lives have never before been so free of immediate physical threats, and yet we’ve never felt so threatened. And that’s because, in the course of our normal everyday lives, with all the responsibilities of work and family, amid the churn of information and news and trends and spin, with the millions of choices available to us, with all the horrors of the world served up to us every second on TV and computers and phones, we mostly just feel anxious, worried, precarious, vulnerable—basically the same emotions we would feel if there really was a famine, or if we really were being hunted.

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly,

THE SIX-HOUR SEMINAR that Jack was forced to attend at the beginning of each new semester had been called Orientation until a few years ago, when the university changed the seminar’s name to Onboarding. The name change coincided with a revamp of the orientation curriculum, which had bloated into this all-day human resources horror during which members of the HR team attempted, at unmerciful length, to “socialize the mission statement’s DNA,” is how they put it. They were referring to the many-planked mission statement the university had spent two years and countless consultant dollars developing in a campus-wide effort to express everything the university did in just one sentence. This was the brainchild of the university’s new CFO, who told the faculty in all seriousness that developing a mission statement that captured everything the university did in just one sentence was akin to their “moonshot,” and he asked for their help in this endeavor “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Why the university needed to corral its collective intelligence and creativity and energy for the task of expressing everything it did in just one sentence was a mystery to most faculty, but this did not stop their administrator bosses from enthusiastically assigning them to “mission statement working groups” so that they could have a voice (unpaid) in developing this one magical sentence, this one statement that would distill everything everyone did into a phrase ideally small enough for letterhead.

He does not know that Facebook is monitoring him and spying on him and even listening to him more or less constantly, nor does he believe it when he’s told this very thing by Jack, that he is being secretly watched by Facebook. This comes in the form of a long private letter that Jack has composed pleading with his father to stop spending so much time with all these conspiracies, that none of them are true, that Lawrence is getting unnecessarily worked up and angry about nothing, that there are no shadowy cabals secretly plotting against the world, and what’s happening here is actually just that a small group of engineers in Silicon Valley have built moneymaking algorithms that are now optimizing, that what Lawrence is seeing is not reality but rather an algorithmic abstraction of reality that sits invisibly atop reality like a kind of distortion field.

Most of their discussions centred on how people were generally, universally crazy. Or a whole lot crazier than her classes in economics had led Elizabeth to believe. In the world of economics, humans were rational agents, doggedly and intelligently pursuing their own self-interest. In Sanborne's world, humans were insane, suffering all sorts of delusions, prey to the smallest stimuli, easily tricked, contradictory, self-sabotaging, untrustworthy, malleable, impulsive, acting according to motivations unknown even to themselves, making everyone miserable. The world described in a microeconomics textbook was a rational and organized pursuit of maximized happiness. What Sanborne offered was a world in which happiness was a satisfying fiction set atop the mind's darker motivations, which accorded pretty well with Elizabeth's own observations, her bafflement at people's messy, careless, inconsistent affections.

A book is a real object, sure, but the form of the book is artifice, a product of industrial mercantile nations nurturing good little middle-class consumers, sheep who learned to do what they were told: turn the page, turn the page, turn the page. Hypertext, on the other hand, presents an antiauthoritarian alternative. Readers of hypertext aren’t passive consumers. They’re creators.” “And what do they create?” “Meaning. People can do what they want in a hypertext. There isn’t an overbearing author telling them what to think. They have the freedom to think what they will. What you have to understand is that information technologies are really just vessels for ideology. Print books are authoritarian and fascist. Hypertexts are liberating and empowering. I’m telling you, dude, traditional storytelling is dying. In the future, all the important literature will be hypertext.” “And this is what the World Wide Web is for?” Jack said. “Hypertext?” “The web seems good for two primary things, and the second is hypertext.” “What’s the first?” “Pornography.” “There’s pornography on the web?

And then I start thinking about if I do pass out then someone will find me and make a big fuss over it and I’ll have to explain why I spontaneously passed out for no reason at all, which is a stupid thing to have to explain to someone, because they’ll think they were being heroic, saving someone from a serious injury or heart emergency or something, and when they find out the only thing that’s wrong with me is that I freaked myself out breathing they get, well, you know, disappointed

And this fact, the quickly coming end of the semester, has lately been filling her with dread. Because she loves the clarity that school brings: the single-minded purpose, the obvious expectations, how everyone knows you’re a good person if you study hard and score well on exams. The rest of your life, however, is not judged in this manner.

Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.

But he couldn’t catch anyone’s eye because, he had noticed, when people were at the gym, they did not tarry. They were not sociable, nor approachable. The women especially, who, when they walked from station to station, stared so hard at the floor it was like they were trying to crack the concrete with their minds. When people at the gym exercised, they did so with expressions of deep inner focus and concentration. When they rested, they looked at their devices. And the entire time they were in the gym, they wore headphones, some of them DJ-huge.

The assigned activity during lunch was a getting-to-know-you game where each person had to describe their “life’s work,” and describe it in the way they would describe it to a normal, nonacademic “regular guy on the street,” is how it was explained by the university’s CFO, a man with a degree in, seriously, just “Business,” who thought it was really important that academics step out of their ivory towers and connect with nonelite, normal, salt-of-the-earth-type folks.

the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that’s what true love actually was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And

When you cling too hard to what you want, you miss what’s really there.

when there’s an informational vacuum, the mind will naturally rush in to fill it.

She began a mental inventory of all the supporting evidence, all the things she’d done to make life harder:

And he wasn’t merely looking at her eyes but actually more like into her eyes or within her eyes, like he was appreciating both the surface of the ocean and the ocean’s floor, simultaneously, such was the quality of his attention.

Don’t forget to subscribe,” she whispered softly, near his ear.

When victories can’t be shared with others, they begin to feel like a different kind of defeat.

people don’t stay like-minded forever.

tranche

This happens to him all the time, Jack feeling shocked to see exactly his own rhetoric from long ago boomeranged through the decades and coming back at him now, via his father, transformed and ugly.

Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty.

mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.

Bye,” she said, to no visible reaction. Then: “Don’t forget to subscribe.” That got him. He looked up at her now, beaming. “Don’t forget to subscribe!

Jack’s lesson here: Sometimes you take the shit that’s forced upon you and call it a stance.

To say that he finds her beautiful is too simple. Of course he finds her beautiful - objectively, classically, obviously beautiful

Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking. We're really very silly creatures.

His desire to be different was a pose, an elaborate emotional defense mechanism, a way to seem unique and special to other people when he himself, emotionally, in his heart, did not feel all that unique or special.

He realized that popular pleasures are such not because they are cliche but because they are often sincerely pleasurable.

that all her work with the placebo effect had shown her that reality could be created by the stories you believed, and thus it was important to pick the right stories.

he feared that the exigencies of parenthood had slowly transformed their marriage into one that was focused on family administration rather than romance, that there was, lately, a distressing lack of spark.

Back rubs,” she says without even pausing to think about it. “Long and luxurious and totally aimless back rubs.” “Hot showers,” he says. “Incredibly hot. Like, use-all-the-hot-water-in-the-whole-building hot.” “The first sip of water when you’re really thirsty.” “The first sip of coffee in the morning.” “The smell of dryer exhaust.” “The smell of hot asphalt at an amusement park.” “Sprinting into the ocean.” “A hayride at sunset.” “Lobster rolls, warm, with melted butter.” “Cheese ravioli out of a can.” “Whoopie pies with marshmallow fluff.” “Tater Tots with mayonnaise.” “The moment everyone at a wedding stands up at the first few notes of the bridal march.” “When you stare at a Rothko so long it looks like it’s vibrating.” “The statue of David.” “American Gothic.” “The beginning of Mozart Forty.” “Rage Against the Machine.” “The violin solo from Scheherazade.

So banks and governments are cleaning up their ledgers after years of abuse. Everyone owes too much, is the consensus, and we’re in for a few years of pain. But Faye thinks: Okay. That’s probably the way it ought to be. That’s the natural way of things. That’s how we’ll find our way back. This is what she’ll tell her son, if he asks. Eventually, all debts must be repaid.

life, can become the truth of your life. He imagined them in Paris trying to talk to each other. She’d give small lectures on the country’s innovative health care system; he’d give similar disquisitions on French jurisprudence. That would get them through one day, maybe two. Then they’d start making small talk about whatever was in front of them at that moment: the charming Parisian streets, the weather, the waiters, the daylight that clung on until well past ten. Museums would be a good choice because of the enforced silence. But then they’d be at a restaurant looking at menus and she’d say what looked good and he’d say what looked good and they’d stare at the plates of other diners and point out those that also looked good and express how they were perhaps changing their mind about what they intended to

History records that there was only one Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo — and that he was too small for his job. The fact is there were two Napoleons at Waterloo, and the second one was big enough for his job, with some to spare. The second Napoleon was Nathan Rothschild — the emperor of finance. During the trying months that came before the crash Nathan Rothschild had plunged on England until his own fortunes, no less than those of the warring nations, were staked on the issue. He had lent money direct. He had discounted Wellington's paper. He had risked millions by sending chests of gold through war-swept territory where the slightest failure of plans might have caused its capture. He was extended to the limit when the fateful hour struck, and the future seemed none too certain. The English, in characteristic fashion, believed that all had been lost before anything was lost -— before the first gun bellowed out its challenge over the Belgian plains. The London stock market was in a panic. Consols were falling, slipping, sliding, tumbling. If the telegraph had been invented, the suspense would have been less, even if the wires had told that all was lost. But there was no telegraph. There were only rumors and fears. As the armies drew toward Waterloo Nathan Rothschild was like a man aflame. All of his instincts were crying out for news — good news, bad news, any kind of news, but news — something to end his suspense. News could be had immediately only by going to the front. He did not want to go to the front. A biographer of the family, Mr. Ignatius Balla, 1 declares that Nathan had " always shrunk from the sight of blood." From this it may be presumed that, to put it delicately, he was not a martial figure. But, as events came to a focus, his mingled hopes and fears overcame his inborn instincts. He must know the best or the worst and that at once. So he posted off for Belgium. He drew near to the gathering armies. From a safe post on a hill he saw the puffs of smoke from the opening guns. He saw Napoleon hurl his human missiles at Wellington's advancing walls of red. He did not see the final crash of the French, because he saw enough to convince him that it was coming, and therefore did not wait to witness the actual event. He had no time to wait. He hungered and thirsted for London as a few days before he had hungered and thirsted for the sight of Waterloo. Wellington having saved the day for him as well as for England, Nathan Rothschild saw an opportunity to reap colossal gains by beating the news of Napoleon's 1 The Romance of the Rothschilds, p. 88. 126 OUR DISHONEST CONSTITUTION defeat to London and buying the depressed securities of his adopted country before the news of victory should send them skyward with the hats of those whose brains were still whirling with fear. So he left the field of Waterloo while the guns were still booming out the requiem of all of Napoleon's great hopes of empire. He raced to Brussels upon the back of a horse whose sides were dripping with spur-drawn blood. At Brussels he paid an exorbitant price to be whirled in a carriage to Ostend. At Ostend he found the sea in the grip of a storm that shook the shores even as Wellington was still shaking the luck-worn hope of France. " He was certainly no hero," says Balla, " but at the present moment he feared nothing." Who would take him in a boat and row him to England? Not a boatman spoke. No one likes to speak when Death calls his name, and Rothschild's words were like words from Death. But Rothschild continued to speak. He must have a boatman and a boat. He must beat the news of Waterloo to England. Who would make the trip for 500 francs? Who would go for 800, 1,000? Who would go for 2,000? A courageous sailor would go. His name should be here if it had not been lost to the world. His name should be here and wherever this story is printed, because he said he would go if Rothschild would pay the 2,000 francs to the sailor's wife before

In case you haven't noticed, the word has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it's way easier to ignore all the data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree.

Our desire for novelty is literally inexhaustible, which is why capitalism is a huge success and monogamy is not.

They both dealt with the pains of today by investing everything in a fantasy of tomorrow.

Or that particular disconnect that men are so unusually good at, that switch in their eyes that flipped off when they heard this stuff, when suddenly they were like: Uh-oh, nope, she's broken, run away.

It is an odd feeling, to sense one's aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.

There are some things you can't fix. If someone wants to be unhappy, there's nothing you can to do to fix that. Okay?

It became a sort of metaphor for everything she and Jack had done wrong in their long relationship. They did not solve their problems; they merely became accustomed to them.

didn’t check her phone because she didn’t want to know. It happened this way all the time now, that she was no longer able to sleep through the night. She consistently woke up at some awful hour, her mind spinning: about work, about Jack, about Toby, about Toby’s new school and new friends, about the move to the suburbs, or sometimes just about the stupidest things—there was a package of chicken in the fridge that was nearing its expiration date, and so she’d have to remember to do something today with that chicken, and she wondered whether she should get up and make a note about the chicken or if she would remember it in the morning on her own, without the note, and then all the chicken-related recipes she had in her head suddenly sort of unspooled before her, and she thought about which chicken dishes they’d eaten recently, and which ones Toby refused to eat, and which ones were healthiest, and so on and so forth. This kind of thing, at three o’clock in the morning, could occupy her for an hour, this dumb thing about chicken.

Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition. The things we think are beautiful are only the things that have been depicted beautifully.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Ecotone. It means an in-between spot. Eco, like ecosystem. And tone, from tonos. That’s Greek. It means ‘tension.’ So it’s like the tension between ecosystems, you understand? The overlap between two worlds. Two worlds in conflict with each other. You see all that land behind us?” He pointed a thumb back at the soft rolling grassy hills. “That land wants to be prairie. But this here land in front of us, it wants to be forest. And this spot, this is where the prairie and the forest are fighting. And this little guy”—he brushed the baby elm gently with a finger—“he’s the advance guard. There’s a slow-motion war happening right here, Jack, beneath our feet, on a scale we can’t even imagine.

She felt a kind of ache rising within her now, a longing that felt as if it had been entombed for decades: that child’s hope that someone would, finally, help.

And maybe that explained it, this recent middle-aged disenchantment, finding herself at the bottom of life’s U-shaped curve: maybe that’s how long it took to discover the specific, tortuous ways you were lying to yourself.