“There are actually people who do nothing but invest in European mid-cap health care debt. I don’t think the problem is specific to finance. I think that parochialism is common to modern intellectual life. There is no attempt to integrate.” — Charlie Ledley (from The Big Short, by Michael Lewis)
“Our lives, the big and magnificent lives we can just barely make out beneath the mere facts of our lifestyles, are always trying to occur. But save for a few rare occasions–falling in love, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a revelatory moment in nature–they don’t occur; the big magnificence is withdrawn. Stories rub at the facts of our lives. They give us access–if only for a few hours, if only in bed at the end of the day–to what’s beneath.” — Jonathan Safran Foer (from his foreword to the Penguin Classics edition of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (emphasis in the original))