The world destroys itself and we rebuild it. The destroying is as important as the rebuilding. There can be as much joy in the destruction as the rebirth.

Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.

The things we agree to call art are the shamanic tokens of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can’t really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide. Everything or nothing.

In the intervening weeks, as they slowly began to poke their heads out of their own private failures, each would come to find that the curse was, in fact, not theirs alone. Instead, it was spread across the country: a club, a collective, a movement, a great populist uprising of failure in the face of years of shared national success.

In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden.

The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.

Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.

Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding.” The professor paused. “It’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic.

They see too much,” her father had said once, when she was doing a report for history class and asked him whether his own parents had ever talked about the war. “They see too much so they have to close their hearts tight. Can’t get them open again.

Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.