The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.

in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.

“Change,” Octavia Butler wrote, “is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe.”

What a word that is, en-courage. Though our dreams be tossed and blown, still we sing ourselves and one another into courage.

The mighty pulse of the throbbing today does make new things out of old—but it also makes old things out of new.

My attention had become so fractured, and my world had become so loud, that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was paying attention to. But when I put myself into the reviews as Sarah suggested, I felt like for the first time in years, I was at least trying to pay attention to what I pay attention to.

there are no observers; only participants.

The Council on Books in Wartime’s slogan was “Books are weapons in the war of ideas,” which was the kind of slogan generals could get behind even if many of the books chosen, including Gatsby, weren’t particularly patriotic.

As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.