George Scialabba Quotes

[If there was] certainty that an acute episode [of depression] will last only a week, a month, even a year, it would change everything. It would still be a ghastly ordeal, but the worst thing about it - the incessant yearning for death, the compulsion toward suicide - would drop away. But no, a limited depression, a depression with hope, is a contradiction. The experience of convulsive pain, along with the conviction that it will never end except in death - that is the definition of a severe depression.

What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another's lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures ( ... ) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation.

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when you're a left-wing sorehead, everything is an occasion to damn the rich.

The more powerful a person or institution is, the more transparent - open to public inspection or oversight - its activities should be. The less powerful, the less transparent.