When the British were deprived of their American Colonies, they were at a loss for a gulag in which to dump their political dissidents, especially the Irish, their petty thieves and social inadequates. Australia was a godsend, better even than America. It was as good as the other side of the moon.

The Bay doesn’t always remind you that it’s saltwater, but today there was surf.

If you looked into the wind…

…you’d get sideways raindrops in your eyes.

It was glorious.

…horses form intimate social bonds, just as elephants do. With horses, though, those bonds, while strong, are also quite fluid. As with humans, friendships come and go…

Many patients secretly wish to be their therapist’s only patient. Or, at least, the favorite—the funniest, most entertaining and, above all, most beloved.

You wonder if you’re a bad daughter, a bad friend, a selfish asshole placing her own intellectual wankery above the living, breathing people who poured everything they could possibly give into her, and were rewarded with the sight of her walking away forever. You never answer that question, and you never will. You strap into your rocket ship anyway. Somehow, you leave.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been this drained. It takes so much magic to stay alive in America.

From the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs.

Common ground, even shared human feeling, is not a given, but is arrived at through imaginative work.

I think of the future I thought I was going to have and the one yawning in front of me like a chasm.

That’s basically the story of every woman’s life, right? You become your mother or you don’t. Of course, every woman says she doesn’t want to be her mother, but that’s foolish. For a lot of women, becoming their mothers simply means growing up, taking on responsibility, acting like an adult is supposed to act.

The trouble is a deep unawareness, and a wish to remain unaware, of the experience of living here, now.

Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why.

“The computerization of society,” the technology writer Frank Rose later observed, was essentially a “side effect of the computerization of war.”

If you find yourself drawn toward the tendency to help or “do something,” you might instead work to increase your capacity to sit with others’ suffering

It seems unfortunate, but nothing was learned from the Chernobyl disaster.

even today we do not know which of the strategies the Soviets tried and the technical solutions they implemented actually worked. Could some of them have made things worse?

…atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking can be seen as a predictable if not inevitable outgrowth of ceding to an authoritarian regime

I thought I understood the fact of my mother’s impending death, but I had not. I had no idea of the feelings and fears and complications, the pit opening up before me, the loss of the key to my identity.

You’ve also stayed away because you’ve discovered how easy it is to cut her loose, how little you actually miss her