They weren’t wizards, just gamblers who could tolerate major losses.

The hardest part of working isn’t the work, my mother tells me, it’s the passing. She means passing as an office worker—dressing the part, performing the rituals of office life, and acting appropriately grateful for a ten-hour shift at a computer.

The rich of the city wanted to believe that the poor made them unsafe, not the other way around.

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.

Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.

the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

Investment isn’t any more of a sin, I think, than gambling. But when shareholders profit at the expense of the workers who produce those profits, it’s a means of extraction. An economy of extraction is what we’re retiring on, those of us who get to retire.

I know now that this is how it is with work—sometimes the contract is revised while you’re on the job, already undressed.

I was intrigued, as a child, that a bottle could also be a woman. She had a job, this woman, holding syrup. But when it was all poured out, when she was empty and her job was done, she became something else.