I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

What if we treated the ones we loved the same way we treated ourselves?

the light too brief to finish any work —the woman seeks to amplify the dark

If you believe getting close to being 50 is bad... wait to see how one feels when getting far crom that age

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.

And just like that, the universe goes wrong. Just like that, all the enormity seems to shrink into a ball and float away from my reach. I feel it, and she doesn't. Or I feel it, and she won't.

Creativity helps us realize that we don't have to understand everything. We can enjoy something -feel it and use it- without ever fully comprehending it.

...if fifty bands of men surrounded us/ and every sword sang for your blood,/ you could make off still with their cows and sheep.

All power in human hands is liable to be abused.

Unlike the actual, the fictional explains itself.