My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh,
I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.

Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

Overhead, the sun is a wrathful god. It is made to ravage a dying land.

The boy stands in a dry gulch. He tilts his hat to the sting of the wind.

These men are patriots, says The Coach.

I reckon.

Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.

Other people’s culture wars always look ridiculous. That’s partly because we frame cultural controversies as battles between the old and the new, and, given that the old is someone else’s status quo and we have no stake in it, we naturally favor the new.

It has been a historic few days. We have been reminded of a simpler time.

Mourners include those who are looking for answers to the pressing questions being asked in our country today.

They seem to be asking, What can we do about our country now?

Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone.

Indeed, charisma, intelligence, and ambition, tempered by a self-deprecating wit, are the particular hallmarks not so much of a great black politician as of any great one.