Eric Nalisnick

“The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

—David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness” (2005)”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Frank's bio prompts us to to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have either to make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish or some shit...Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson