How do you make art when the art that's all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes? - Rebecca Solnit

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.

There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman’s book.