things i always knew to be true but other people said better

If you are an adult who still wants to write, it’s because you want to be heard. Feeling as if no one hears you, for a prolonged period of time, can lead to a kind of desperation, a kind of intense entitlement.

research shows that those who ask follow-up questions are better liked by their conversation partners

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

People without culture will never significantly change the culture and I stand by that.

Anthropology teaches us that every society tells stories about why inequality is natural and inevitable.

“The American,” he writes, “was an individual first, nothing second.”

If no one wrote about romance or frivolity or joy or fantasy because times were too dark then we have nothing but despairing, didactic dramas. Making sense of the world takes so many forms! Some of them just engage the lineage of despair more explicitly than others.

Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated - it’s venerated.