'… notebooks which promised, deceitfully, on the blank front page, to be the place, finally, where life and writing would converge.'

'Their speech will be confounded; they will leave off the building of their own city.'

New Hope for the Dead

'It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it—your thoughts, your programming.'

'The actual magic trick is making the worker disappear.'

'… a spiritually corrosive quality…'

Snow.

It is also why school sucks and recess rules.

The more widely read a classic is, the more it sucks to read, because you know you're supposed to think things about it, and you want to, but you know that the things you think won't satisfy anyone until you also read the crap everyone says about it, which makes you kind of not even want to think the things you think about it.

This is why reading Emerson is better than reading Kant.

For example.