I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

I'm clearer now in what I want to say, and I know better how to say just that.

Different times and different structures make more sense at one point in life than at another.

I am clearer in my mind and a bit less confused than I used to be.