there are no observers; only participants.

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

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

is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

“I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” And that seems to me the underlying problem—not just with CNN and other cable news networks, but with contemporary information flow in general. So often, I end up knowing what just ain’t so.

These communities hunted and gathered, and there were no large caloric surpluses, so every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water—and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

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.

Smell’s radical specificity is part of what connects it so particularly to memory; it’s also part of why imitation is so difficult, even when it comes to artificial odors.

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.