This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

Flipping backward through the photos, Nicholas feels the years peel off like steamed wallpaper. Always the animals.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to surviv

It’s a single tree with two sexes, older than the separation of yin and yang, the Tree of Renewal, the tree at the universe’s center, the hollow tree housing the sacred Tao.

In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

“Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.”

to outspend the police, who are funded by a public convinced that all taxes are theft, but giving away public timber is not.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions.

He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.