The Vaster Wilds: A Novel

The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.

She had been born a babe out of the darkness out of nothing; she had sparked to first breath and first wonder. As is the truth of all the people who have walked and will walk upon the earth, she returned at last to all she had been before life.

Rejoice, small ant, she thought, in your one life, though too soon dimmed it shall be.

inches beyond this face of hers and in the profoundest sufferings of her body, the world went on in its grand and renewing and wholly indifferent beauty.

To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive,

It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world,

she went on walking, still nameless, unmastered, through the wilds.

humans were not made to be always alone; humans survive only in the company of other humans.

empire has no pity and is never sated.