Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night, turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.

I’d heard these songs hundreds of times before. But to listen to them with other people: it was what I’d been waiting for.

Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic—this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artis

we would come to recognize that concepts that seem natural to us are full of contradictions. Perhaps accepting this messiness would lead us to a more conscious and intelligent way of living.

Knowledge might not set you free or light your path. It could become a kind of cage.

It was the kind of scene I had wanted to see for months, a clue that beauty was still possible. Maybe it was nothing more than shifting cloud patterns. But I saw it.

The allure all these years had been the possibility of the asymptote’s line one day meeting the curve. At first this realization that I could never force a connection seemed tragic; then it became comforting to imagine that the line and the curve could go on forever. They move in the same direction, even if they never touch.

Somehow, he remains optimistic. There’s no other way to be. The only constant in this life, in this work, is the passage of time, and with it, change.

It was exciting to meander and choose who you wanted to be, what aspects of yourself to accent and adorn. You were sending a distress signal, hoping someone would come to your rescue.

The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another.