[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

five severed fingers do not make a hand

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally.

And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.

The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

The world doesn't belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet--it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight