Quotes from Stuart Rojstaczer

Her craziness was happily wed to her intellect. There are no reasonable geniuses in this world, I am convinced.

We expect and demand people to maintain bonds with family. It doesn't matter whether you love or hate your relatives, even ones you've legally divorced. As long as there are children involved, you stick together.

Survival, to my mind, implies a finite probability that without luck and cunning, you will perish.

But grief always hits hard and somehow lingers longer than exultation in your mind and heart,

The dead don't come back. Not to this world. This world is too cruel for anyone to want to come back.

That's what I have told people who have asked for advice through the years: focus on what is beautiful and pursue that beauty.

But to try to achieve something massively significant in a field where you're by and large useless after your fortieth birthday—and my father was seventy-seven—is the height of both delusion and optimism.

It is like breathing to us, and to ignore math in this story would be akin to listening to Frank Zappa without ever having taken hallucinogens, an incomplete experience.

To Americans, the outward display of intelligence is considered unseemly. The Donald Trumps of the world can boast about their penthouses and Ferraris, their women can wear baubles the size of Nebraska, and no one says boo. If you have money, you're almost always expected to flaunt it. But intellect? This is something else entirely. Women, especially, are supposed to play dumb.

This inability of Americans to value intellect is, to me, maddening. If someone possesses physical beauty, they will not be cloistered or hidden in dark shadows.

There is no such thing as unnecessary beauty, whether it be physical or intellectual.

In a country as profoundly anti-intellectual as ours it is predictable that our leaders will do whatever they can in order not to appear smart in public.

This effort to appear dumb—or to put a positive spin on it, to "be a man of the people"—takes a lot of work that in a better world would be unnecessary. You have to really want to be a politician to undertake it.

I could insult him for his pedestrian intelligence and whacky ideas, but even I know that there is a bit more to life than intellect.

While great hair and teeth are a good start to a political career, an ability to pretend at least half convincingly that you have an affinity to all key ethnic groups in your state is a definite plus.

With my family, historical facts are subsidiary to narrative, and narrative must always show the narrator in the best light.

Solutions to problems never trespass into anything of real value.

We aren't rednecks. We're European. Big difference.

I liken my marriage in my twenties to the ill-chosen shot by a basketball player, done without any thought from an impossible angle and motivated by a mix of pure adrenaline and ego, which his coach watches with complete despair as he involuntarily shouts "nooooo.

There is an old joke in Finland, a country proud of its collective introspective character and shyness. "How do you know when a Finnish man likes a woman? He stares at her shoes instead of his.

I thought about my family. It was small by any standard, shrunken to a handful by Hitler, Stalin, and divorce.

As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't drink nearly enough. A good alcoholic poisoning of the brain now and then clears it out in a way that nothing else can.

Very unusual. American women aren't like this, typically. They want to be wooed. Sweet-talked. Romanced. They want a big fantasy first. Reality comes later. I never have luck with American women.

A Ph.D. big-shot professor. A mother who is a genius. And you shit in plastic bags. Unbelievable