"There is a certain hidden mediocrity in those who are stationed above us in life, an ability to take liberties in their pursuit of pleasures and diversions, without injuring the honor and respect we owe to them."

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I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.

— Charles D'Ambrosio