Elan Mastai

“You believe what you do.”

— Elan Mastai

“Anyone can overthrow a government. It’s ruling that’s hard.”

— Elan Mastai

“The brain is a soupy lightning storm swirling and crackling in three pounds of wet meat. Do”

— Elan Mastai

“When you jump off a cliff, falling can look a whole lot like flying, for a while anyway.”

— Elan Mastai

“You know you're having a seriously fucked-up day when ontology becomes a life-or-death proposition”

— Elan Mastai

“Most of life is defined by how you handle failure.”

— Elan Mastai

“it’s hard to explain to someone that they should’ve died in hideous, molten pain five decades ago.”

— Elan Mastai

“She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and no she's gone.”

— Elan Mastai

“Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else's dreams.”

— Elan Mastai

“Bland friendliness is easier than spending even one joule of energy formulating an opinion on someone fundamentally irrelevant to you.”

— Elan Mastai

“Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears…

— Elan Mastai

“When you’re young, you think of your parents with the simplest adjectives. As you get older, you add more adjectives and notice…

— Elan Mastai

“I try to formulate a plan but my thoughts are a toxic fizz of regret, panic, and self-loathing, as if someone shook…

— Elan Mastai

“But the world feels too big and the words feel too small, and turning the slushy tangle of memories into clean lines…

— Elan Mastai

“When you invent the car, you also invent the car accident. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.”

— Elan Mastai

“She will become our driving political operator. You might not think a career in academia would prepare her for that, but it…

— Elan Mastai

“You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant…

— Elan Mastai

“They were married within a year and slotted themselves into their respective lifelong roles—my father was the lighthouse, my mother the keeper…

— Elan Mastai

“But there was something else, hard to pin down exactly, a charge—this magnetic pheromonal buzz that hung between us like a spider’s…

— Elan Mastai

“don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now.…

— Elan Mastai

“I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now. That's all science is. A collection of the best answers…

— Elan Mastai

“When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel…

— Elan Mastai

“Lionel Goettreider read Cats Cradle and had a crucial realization, what he called the "Accident" - when you invent a new technology…

— Elan Mastai

“You got a little bit famous. Even a little bit of fame can mess with your head. It’s a cognitive disease, you…

— Elan Mastai

“The truth is, there are no alternate realities. At least not the way Penny describes them. Maybe an infinite multiverse is born…

— Elan Mastai

“I've considered many other lives that I could be living instead of this one. I've luxuriated in what seemed at the time…

— Elan Mastai

“Is there a word for a thing you know you absolutely shouldn’t do, that would be wrong in every way that matters…

— Elan Mastai