How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us? - Mark Kingwell

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

It is only through a devoted attention to the details of objects and faces in the modern urban scene, he argues, that the commodity fetish of capitalism can be effectively dispelled.