To live as fully, as completely as possible, to be happy. . . is the true aim and end to life.
It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.
The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.
I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.
Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.
There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.
Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.
I'm not a skinny girl. I push it. I'm at the limit of chubbiness at all times, but I'm happy at all times.
Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.
Trust the story. . . the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.
We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.