The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may … - Saul Bellow

In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and big-scale lavishness, unpierceable concreteness, organizational deeds. So there are these various remedies and many more, older ones, but you don't actually have full choice among all the varieties, especially those older ones of the invisible world. Most people make do with what they have, and labor in their given visible world, and this has its own stubborn merit.

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too

California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.