The adage is that racing is twenty per cent jockey and eighty per cent horse. If a horse wins by five lengths or more, it was the horse; the jockey only had to avoid mistakes, such as getting pinned on the rail or taking a turn too wide. But in close races the jockey’s tactics and riding skills can be decisive.
–John Seabrook “Puerto Rico’s Ortiz Brothers Light Up Horse Racing” The New Yorker
“I see the death of reading as just an aspect of this. I have to see it that way, otherwise it’s just cultural whining, and cultural whining is boring.”
David Remnick “Into the Clear: Philip Roth”
“Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That’s a very easy way to visualize it,” Roth said. By “readers,” he said, he means people who read serious books seriously and consistently.
David Remnick “Into the Clear: Philip Roth”
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Romans 12:1
He belonged to nothing.
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
— Joan Didion A Book of Common Prayer
Angela Merkel is not going to resign as the Chancellor of Germany. “No, that’s not on the table,” she said, with a small, suppressed smile, when asked, by one of two interviewers for the German television broadcaster ZDF, if that prospect had, “in quiet moments,” occurred to her. She hasn’t had many quiet moments this weekend, a juncture at which her job, at least to observers, has never seemed more in danger—even if Merkel herself doesn’t see it that way.
The New Yorker
As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own.
The New York Times
Four hundred and fifty million dollars spent for anything short of a next-generation strategic bomber, let alone a beat-up old painting, not only makes no sense relative to current markets in worldly goods; it suggests that money has become worthless.
The New Yorker
Those first few years, we had a pretty rough time of it. It’s hard to describe the initial shock, the terrible bewilderment, the agonies. No way to talk about it then; barely any way to talk about it now.
— Junot Diaz “Waiting for Spider-Man” The New Yorker
… she preferred want to shame, wandering to a lordly house …
Quo Vadis
The Metal Detector 