Nearly all great movies adhere quite rigidly to the conventions of a genre, nearly all movies that try not to do so are disasters, and so it is with lives.
Being
Identity, that spectator of what he calls himself,
That net and aggregate of energies in transient combination.
—Cunningham
Once in a while evil triumphs because good men do nothing, but usually because they meddle in what is none of their damn business.
We try to convince ourselves that villains are unhappy: it should be enough to know that they are bad.
Friends accumulate, like unmatched socks; enemies are chosen advisedly.
Your self does not lie in what you love, still less in what you hate; or what you think, still less in what you feel: it lies in what you say and do and nothing more.
Many people are so bored and unhappy that they welcome a personal disaster, as a change, and especially a social disaster, as a change in which others will suffer as well.
True friends have seen the best in you, and put up with you anyway.
Countless acts of surpassing excellence have been committed out of spite and fear.
Sanity is less a particular outlook than a practiced aversion to the multifarious forms of crazy.
There is a happiness in widely-shared enforced misery that goes a long way toward explaining nostalgia for Stalinism, or broadcast television.