Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.