“One of the opportunities cancer provides is the chance to take stock of your life and ask yourself the big questions about what you’re doing and where you’re going. At the same time; it can help you cherish the good moments, to tell the people you love that you love them, and to appreciate the gift of the tiniest, most elemental sensations”

“The conceit behind What History Could Have Been was to sound the depths of this third possibility: to foreground the imaginative aspects of writing history, or even, more broadly, the imaginative aspects of having a meaningful relationship with the past.”

“Why is it that when people speak of things they must promptly pronounce them foolish or clever, or wicked or good! … Can you really give a definite account of the reasons why it happened, and why it had to happen?”

“Our modern identities, while indispensable to functioning in society, are not to be cemented, codified, and carefully constructed, but to be frustrated, disrupted, and broken up.”

“All this beating and bobbing wasn’t about dancing. It was about an experience: an experience of time. Or better yet — an experience out of time.”

“Nothing has changed fundamentally… it is still the world which thinks us. The difference is that today we think the opposite. We believe ourselves to be autonomous beings, administering our desires in the service of our will, our freedom, our liberty. But these ideas make no allowance for the possibility that our desires could come from somewhere else, that our lives could happen in collusion with what happens to them.”

“Stepping into Yale life is like walking into wild rapids—it’s impossible not to get caught up in the torrent. From day one there is a powerful undercurrent that pressures you not only to define yourself by what you do, but also to be successful while doing it… Unfortunately, because of one oft-overlooked consequence, this approach to life is doomed to fail. I call it The Suckage Factor: if you do too many things, you’re going to suck at all of them.”

“Over time, the fictions of those in power become the facts of those in power.”

“Wordsworth’s great epic of inward exploration opens with a young man fleeing the hustle of metropolitan life: ‘escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined / A discontented sojourner: now free, / Free as a bird to settle where I will.’ Bingo!”

“My plan was simple: As soon as the semester ended, I would make a pilgrimage to the Lake District with nothing more than a spare change of clothes and a copy of The Prelude… Somehow through a mysterious process of poetic osmosis, I would ‘become a living soul.’”