The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

“I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or some place like that. It’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.”

Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to talk about the suffering of others without exploiting that suffering, whether you can write about pain without glorifying or ennobling or degrading it.

more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

Here was a world without whys, where life was meaninglessness all the way down. Modernity had come to war, and to the rest of life.

“An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” Even on his deathbed, Burns could turn a phrase. Within a few decades of Burns’s death,

Atticus Finch defines courage by saying, “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway.”

For professional athletes, the yips are a threat not just to their livelihood but also to their identity.