It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after. - Rebecca Solnit

I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analyzing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.

What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)