As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

Howling duststorms of nuclear ashes. Human and animal bone powder. Flakes and fragments of the destroyed world. Filthy tempests of death. I am in Hell, he said.

Everyone has ocean's to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

I loved too sincerely, too completely, I venture to say, to be able to be happy easily.

You are all things. Denying, rejecting, judging or hiding from any aspect of your total being creates pain and results in a lack of wholeness.

The man who has no inner life is a slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.

Socrates isguilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing indeities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end.

I quite love sequins; I think it's the drag queen in me.

A herd of prairie-wolves will enter a field of melons and quarrel about the division of the spoils as fiercely and noisily as so many politicians.