But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything … I am going to write a little book for Murray on orchids and I hate them worse than everything.

Charles Darwin, in a letter to Charles Lyell, via NPR

Maybe this (leaving academia for a chance at something else) is just a story I want to tell myself about who I am and who I could be. But I guess at the end of the day I’d rather tell my own story and let it fail than follow the plot of someone else’s.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms