Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

I like to travel and connect.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.