Brian Sholis

- "Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. [...] Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself."

* "I find that people often believe they have a writing technique problem, when, actually, what they have is a sincerity problem."

* “The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural... See more

- “… a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area.”

- "What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?"

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."

Sometimes you find ideas for the future in stories from the past. This book is the best survey I know of covering adult education, which is pretty much what all education was in many of the decades it covers. The description:

- “In short, it’s the irreversible rise of entropy that makes timekeeping possible, while both periodicity and complexity enhance clock performance.”