You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog. - Douglas Coupland

The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.

Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village—locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.”

What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.