We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.

She did manage to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men. If there is one sentence that captures the surprising results of this election, it is this one from the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi: 'Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle.'

Going into this campaign, I did not have that one on my bingo card.

I do not see how a man can work at the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.

Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up as an old lady, then kick him down the stairs. If you want to make a comedian laugh, it has to be an actual old lady.

History doesn't repeat itself, but It often rhymes

He was the bravest boy I ever met!

The mighty whale is mine! Have you seen him?

So very like a woman – so very unlike a whale.