If a person takes a big risk and makes it, that’s a success. If a person risks it and dies in the Atlantic, being called reckless seems kinder alternative to being called a failure.

Fathers are depicted as staggering oafs or well-meaning clowns, to be suffered by their wives and insulted by their children.

Classically ideal dads are so rare that this cartoon character is being lauded as one of the best examples of the ideal in recent memory.

Winter’s scarcity is deadly for predators, and nature doesn’t care about maintaining nobility or the optics of a dead raccoon lunch.

Damage a brain enough and brain death occurs. By the same token, after a certain number of neurons are lost, there is no self. Whatever consciousness is, it can’t be sustained with a sufficiently compromised brain.

This is observable in late stage dementia patients, it gradually becomes difficult to think and in the final dire stages their sense of self degrades too.

I like Notes from the Underground and his other short stories (like the Double) even more.