If you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you could have heard the trees screaming.

Theirs was a world of fear and chaos, with tiny islands of goodness and hope.

“It is imperative you exude merriment,” he stressed.

…there is no exclusively ‘white’ history of Australia—when we—First Nations people—have always been here. There is no ‘Black’ history of Australia in the last 240-plus years, either. We are each other’s shadows. To make sense of our shared history, we need to go back to the very beginning.

What the industry wants to do is revert to the mean—always.

Her family had been happy here, at least in her memory.

More than a few times she’d even prayed, selfishly, for The End to hold off until after she was dead and buried, so that she might be spared the pain of bearing witness to it.

Emotions and feelings were not impediments to reason; they were integral. “Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were,” he wrote.

She’s a nightmare, top to bottom, but being mad at her is technically biphobia, so.

A woman who has reached forty-five in the heterocapitalist economy can arrive at the lesbian economy with a status close to adolescence. Bingo.

Our deepest problems are the inescapable side-effects of the FIAT system we live in, a system based on domination: our collapsing climate, the gaping wealth gap, discrimation against people of color, the exploitation of women. We need a generative way of relating to one another…

For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.

…every individual manifestation is only a reflection of Brahman, the absolute reality that underlies the phenomena of the world.

My whole life with the girls is telescoped into this moment—running away, running back. Fly, be free! I want to say. I want to say, Stay with me forever! Come to think of it, these are the two things I want to say to everyone I love most.

The reality that seized me is the reality of a world more abundant and wise and beautiful than anything I deserved, its people more courageous and more generous.

A defeated, airless, ugly feeling rose in her whenever she heard a person of her parents’ generation talking brightly about home ownership, or foreign holidays, or financial serendipity, or education for its own sake, or second chances in a crowded field; she felt this way sometimes simply if someone spoke about the future – even the very near future – in optimistic terms.

TREES ARE PLANTS THAT PEOPLE CALL TREES—A TERM OF DIGNITY, NOT botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness.

The British called this conflict “The Great Game,” but no Russian people called it that.

Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.

Then came the inexplicable shame. Of not being believed. Of not being worth more.