For Liz to make more albums, she had to admit that she was capable of it, and accept the burden of consciously deciding what each record would be like, rather than finding out afterwards. In everybody else's world, Whip-Smart was her first deliberate decision, and to me it was banal and bad. In my world, then, as of tonight, it never happened. The Walls Ablaze is now the middle record, and the series finally ascends from being merely milestones in my subjective history of pop to meaning something. Detaching emotional involvement from sex is only a way to defer relationship problems, not to solve them.
Cleverness is intelligence without a sense of purpose.
Science is collaborative, history more so, romance more still. The mistakes we make are our opportunities to become part of something bigger than ourselves. If you look hard enough, you can see a romantic in everybody. And if, occasionally, you have to look so hard that you see straight through one person to another, then we simply all must learn to be lenses, or try to keep track of what eyes we're standing between, that we might duck at just the right moment for them to meet.