Nicholson Baker
» Adulthood » “In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.”
» Books and Reading » “Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.”
» Proverbs » “Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you’ve watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.”
» Sympathy » “The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
