As I approached the doorway to Earth, I was hesitant to enter. I kept looking over my shoulder. I heard the crisp voice of the releaser of souls urge me forward. “Don’t look back!” And I remembered how Earth is a heavy teacher yet is so much loved by the creator of planetary beings.

The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution

I don’t think there’s virtue in labor for the sake of labor, in endlessly harvesting beyond one’s needs.

The land we stand on feels solid, but the continents float on molten magma like dumplings on a simmering stew.

Abraxa loves them both, wishes them only good. They’ll leave me, she tells herself, and then the thought rearranges itself like a warm wax lamp: they’ll let me go.

Native trees like native people do not understand or care for the profit motive.

I keep trying to make everything fit in my head, and the best I can figure is: We’re all we’ve got. You know? We have to take care of each other.

Relationship building. > Empire building.

Cancel all uncreative, uninspiring time-sucks.

I was convinced that I’d never have any friends, so I had this idea of being one to myself. I could be honest and loyal and supportive. I could listen to myself and make myself laugh.

I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins.

Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories.

…we live in this hellhole, and we think it’s got to be this way. But what if we’re wrong?

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

Working in media—new, old, or whatever—you got very used to the fact that almost anything that made any sort of money was, if you dug deep enough, controlled by the same three straight white men.

As far as she was concerned, the feudal era had never ended.

I read 109 books this year only if you count the four series I read (George Smiley, A Dance to the Music of Time, Jinny at Finmory and the Vorkosigan saga) as one each, so there’s probably another 20 or so in there. Looking back, the books that have made the biggest impression were Dan Ozzi’s Sellout, a venture capital story and the perfect accompaniment to My Chem’s Long Live the Black Parade tour; Elaine Pagel’s Miracles and Wonder, which I like so much I’ve started a podcast about it, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

I’ve been annoying my loved ones by thinking aloud that Origin may be the most profound book ever written in English. I first tried to read it when I was fifteen (my older kid: “Why did you try to read it when you were fifteen?” Jeremy: “You know what she’s like.”) Coming back to it forty years later is like returning to La Sagrada Familia with the stained glass windows in; it took my breath away. You may know that of all fictional characters my most ardent affection is reserved for Stephen Maturin. Brilliant, fussy, fretful Darwin is his original.

Origin of Species sees Darwin assembling forty years of patient, painstaking, insightful work in natural history, corresponding with a vast web of respected peers, and synthesizing a staggering amount of data into a careful, considered and powerfully supported argument. At the same time, he understands what the evidence points towards, and what its implications are. Christianity will never be the same again.

Darwin and his wife Emma buried their favorite child Annie when she was ten years old. There’s a glib way to read this – that the loss caused Darwin to turn against God. My impression is quite the opposite. Despite what the promise of resurrection held out to him, and to his beloved wife, Darwin perceives the world with tremendous integrity. One cannot reconcile the account of the creation as written with our current understanding of geologic time. His clarity on this point, and what it cost him, breaks my heart. He stands at the end of a Church of England ontology and with great courage, faces a new and chaotic modernity –

My older kid: “So what you’re saying is, he reminds you of your Dad.” Me: “HEY now. That is UNcalled-for.” Jeremy, sympathetically: “Oh no, have you been perceived?”

English, which had started out as a language of the oppressed, had become an oppressor.

Were there schools? A few, to train servants of the empire.

We had been lied to so often that we spent half our time seeing through lies, but inexplicable things still happened.