Rob Goodman:

As Martha Nussbaum puts it, The Bacchae teaches us that "any reasonably rich and complete life, sexual or social, is lived in a complex tension between control and yielding, risking always the loss of order." How to live inside this tension, how to manage intoxication, is one of the hardest lessons that mark adulthood. It's also one of the richest.

Penelope Trunk:

I want to be writing the ideas people read late at night, with a glass of wine, to dull the searing impact of the life they've already chosen.

Samuel Johnson, 1751:

Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.