'I'm 20 feet tall', Erykah Badu sings. Which sort of response is better: 'She is!', or 'She's not really, but…'?

'I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras… You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows.'

You can get past it, rise above it, set it aside, forget about it, brush it off. The question is, when?

Lend a hand, that's an ethic.

'In particular, Nietzsche would have been very aware that inconsistencies can be explained away. Intellectuals are very good at this, partly because they're often trained in it; so when you try to insist on inconsistencies in their system of values, you get, not acknowledgement, but theologizing, and centuries of it.'

'It is a joke—and yet the voice that carries it remains something new in rock 'n' roll, which is to say something new in postwar popular culture: a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.'

Woman, late forties, at the counter of a Taco Bell: 'I've never been inside one of these before'.

Who wouldn't like to be lighthearted?

What it means depends.