We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation Never to get lost is not to live.

People are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they've recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc.

There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.