The Season for Dreaming

"I thought that adulthood would basically consist of having a series of very interesting conversations about great books. It turns out adulthood primarily consists of standing in line and being on hold."

"The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us."

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I love it. I absolutely love it. I wish I had grown up in the era of fan fiction, because I was living those shows and those movies that I loved and I would put on the score to Superman and just relive the movie over and over.

I think it’s kind of a glorious thing to be able to be carrying the torch. That’s why I made these shows. I didn’t make them so that people would enjoy them and forget them; I made them so they would never be able to shake them. It’s the way I am as a fan. I create the shows that would make me do that.

"

"‘What are your thoughts on Tumblr?’ My thoughts? I think it’s the number one destination on the internet for images of Paula Deen riding me."

"‘When teachers say ‘the author means…’ do you really mean those things?’ Yeah, probably, but in my opinion teachers shouldn’t say that, because one, teachers aren’t really in the business of reading authors’ minds, and two, and more importantly, what authors mean doesn’t really matter, I don’t think. What’s important is that critical reading can be a way into thinking quite deeply about questions that are difficult and complicated, and not in some like boring and abstract way, like, ‘Oh, in Moby Dick, white is a symbol for nature’s ambivalence to man,’ but instead in a concrete and totally interesting way, like, ‘nature’s complete indifference to you, as expressed by the color white in Moby Dick, is something that you had better get your head around or else you’re going to end up like Captain Ahab.’ So it’s not so much about uncovering secret mysteries for the sake of uncovering secret mysteries, it’s about using story as a way into thinking about our actual lives and how we’re actually living them."

"It’s worth remembering that 700 years later we don’t remember the individuals who build the Belfry or dug the canals. We don’t remember their political affiliation or even their nationalistic identities. We remember them as a collective, just as we ourselves will be remembered as a collective for what we did and failed to do together."

"In short, Hank, I felt grateful to the 13th century, but lucky to be alive in 2011, living in a world wher,e with a series of ones and zeros, we can build our own relationships and our own monuments."

"But you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process."

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."