Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we're doing on this planet.

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don't know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It's not that I'm not interested-it's not where I live. I live inside the story.

There's so much to be afraid of.