…it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.

It was a nice posting; the intercept operators could hitchhike into San Francisco. Chamberlain began fiddling with her dial, trying to pick up the Hiroshima station she received. Hiroshima sent out a very good signal. Now all she got was dead air. There was nothing at all.

Was I molested? No, I wasn’t fucking molested. I mean, no more than the average female born circa 1970.

Every day, the universe reminds me that, yes, I am safe now, but I am in America.

The barriers that prevent people from entering the middle class are the defining feature of the middle class

How typical of her not to know something was over when it was over.

Belonging in two places makes you a bridge.

Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing.

In general my reading life is a richly satisfying one. Between my e-reader and my membership of one of the world’s great city libraries. I have more excellent books at my fingertips than I can ever read. It’s churlish of me to complain about having begun three this week that irked me. Nevertheless!

The first was told by an early hominid who was acutely aware of her sloping brow, hairy feet and other differences from Homo sapiens, much as female characters written by misogynists are always breasting boobily down the stairs. The third was nominally about a saintly college gardener, but actually about the author who hired him and who was such a raging snob that he managed to make everyone appearing in the book, from the gardener to his own six year old daughter, seem repulsive. A feat that would be hard to do if you were trying! Which he wasn’t.

Second’s the worst though, because the book itself is fine and the audiobook performer is great… as long as he isn’t trying to do the accents. Every American, from Whitman to Emerson to Merrill, has a Texan drawl. Rousseau sounds like Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau. I don’t know what Wittgenstein’s supposed to be but it isn’t Austrian.

And it turns out the only thing worse than taking Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines at face value is making Chatwin himself, born in Sheffield, sound like Crocodile Dundee. Excuse me while I walk into the sea.

embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.

We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care.

both Sleeping and Snow attracted the attentions of princes with necrophiliac leanings.

the great curse of Euro-American history is its shallowness, its failure to take root in a place so different from its place of origin.

If I spent years clawing toward sunlight from the bottom of a dry well, that summer I looked over the edge for the first time and saw my sister.

Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood.

A Muir Woods park ranger once remarked to me that she saw in these structures the great redwood forests that had been cut down to build them, and so those tall groves up and down the coast were another ghostly presence.

Historically, much of Earth exploration has been rooted in colonialism and subjugation. What kind of remnant legacies and unexamined assumptions thread through today’s discussions to colonize Mars?

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

There is no fellowship in Hell, the only relationship possible is that of tormenting one another.

I felt that I’d been here before, had walked into these grassy slopes on a sunny day, horses in the distance lifting their heads, watching me pass. Wildflowers would have been blowing in a warm breeze.