Debbie Foster

In a sense, what keeps an OCD patient rooted in the world of the neurotic rather than the psychotic, what tethers her to a certain agreed-on reality, the adherence to which seems to be our measure of functional sanity, is her healthy sense of the boundaries of her own ego—her ability to toggle complex and contradictory conceptions of self and

In fact, the many reasons why you may be procrastinating can be divided into just three categories: they can stem from your head, your heart, or your hand.

The frontal cortices appear to be instrumental in assembling the vast mental panoramas that the process of consciousness literally illuminates and identifies as ours.

this is precisely how “prophecy” works—it is always self-fulfilling.

What's beautiful depends on who we are, what we've encountered, where we live, and when. Likewise, the art that opens us to the chaotic stream of reality-the art we find beautiful-changes with time and with us, as we evolve. Beauty, I'd come to think, doesn't have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn't have to be something we agree on.

The problem, as Ghosh sees it, is that the parameters of reality demanded by the western novel—parameters that have been adopted worldwide, including in India, where he grew up—have always been deliberately, excessively narrow. At the birth of the western novel, the literary imagination was reconstructed around the idea of bourgeois stability and

If you want to look anywhere for the moment when the Romantic idea of genius—the tubercular poet communing with nature—yielded to the modern one—of a workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation - look to this New Jersey hamlet in the late 1870s.

The impossible questions are the only questions. The existence of the devil revealed the limits of the God we believed to be limitless, and it was reasonable to wonder why. Children know this and adults pretend we don't remember.

… perhaps the thing that religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.