Megan

“It is easy to despise institutions, to feel irritated or constrained by them - as I often do, despite a fondness for an ordered existence - but confronted with the style of Cy I felt glad he was at least tethered to an institution, like a red balloon caught in a tree, instead of floating out into the unforgiving city and finding himself deflated in the IT department of a bank or ad agency or some such. [...] The best we could hope for was that the university might act as a superstructure, accommodating and supporting our curious shapes and styles, and that this institutional cover would fool people into thinking we were something like utilities - and therefore something worth retaining - rather than peculiar manifestations of the spirit, seemingly put on earth to connect one thing to another.”
― Zadie Smith, Intimations