"Present shock provides the perfect cultural and emotional pretexts for apocalyptic thinking. It is destabilizing; it deconstructs the narratives we use to make meanings; it leads us to compulsively overwind, magnifying the stakes of any given moment; it leads us to draw paranoid connections where there are none; and, finally, its lack of regard for beginnings and endings - its focus on the perpetual now- drives us to impose order on chaos. We invent origins and end points as a way of bounding our experience and limiting the sense of limbo. We end up with no space - no time- between the concept of choosing to wear contact lenses and that of replacing our brains with nanobots. There is a continuum. Every tiny alpha must imply a terminal omega."

"Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. ‘No artist tolerates reality,’ says Nietzsche. That is true, but no artist can get along without reality. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is."

"As a child I never heard one woman say to me, “I love my body.” Not my mother, my elder sister, my best friend. No one woman has ever said, “I am so proud of my body.” So I make sure to say it to Mia, because a positive physical outlook has to start at an early age."

"Present shock provides the perfect cultural and emotional pretexts for apocalyptic thinking. It is destabilizing; it deconstructs the narratives we use to make meanings; it leads us to compulsively overwind, magnifying the stakes of any given moment; it leads us to draw paranoid connections where there are none; and, finally, its lack of regard for beginnings and endings - its focus on the perpetual now- drives us to impose order on chaos. We invent origins and end points as a way of bounding our experience and limiting the sense of limbo. We end up with no space - no time- between the concept of choosing to wear contact lenses and that of replacing our brains with nanobots. There is a continuum. Every tiny alpha must imply a terminal omega."

"And you ask yourself—where are your dreams? And you shake your head and murmur: how quickly time flies! And you ask yourself again—what have you done with your time, where have you buried the best years of your life? Have you lived or not? Look, you say to yourself, look how everything in the world is growing cold. Some more years will pass, and they will be followed by cheerless solitude, and then will come tottering old age, with its crutch, and after it despair and desolation. Your fantastic world will fade away, your dreams will wilt and die, scattering like yellow leaves from trees. Oh, what can be more heartbreaking that to be left alone, all alone, and not have anything to regret even—nothing, absolutely nothing, because all you’ve lost was nothing, nothing but a silly round zero, nothing but an empty dream!"