It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.

It was just enough to sit there without words.