Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story.

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

There was an assumption that aerial bombing of civilians in World War II would cause fragile, working-class people to basically have nervous breakdowns and it would paralyze the state. That was the logic of aerial bombing. In fact, it doesn't happen at all, but the logic behind aerial bombing has never stopped, even though it never demoralizes, terrorizes, or paralyzes a population.

...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion.