Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.
You know what I think? I think everyone should be able, just once, to make an inanimate object come to life and be his pal. Like an orange. Or a hammer.
Who else but utopians could make utopia?
Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.
In her life Josie had heard only one or two people apologize. Wasn’t that something? Wouldn’t that be significant to future anthropologists? This was a time in history when no one was sorry. Sorry took too much courage, too much strength and faith and rightness to have a place in this cowardly century.
At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.
How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can’t decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.
I will reach upward. I will attempt to do better. I will not be a burden upon those who have helped me too much already. I will always be grateful for what pleasures I have enjoyed, what joys I have yet to experience. I will take opportunities as they come, but at the same time, I will not trust so easily. I will look at who is at the door before opening it. I will try to be fierce. I will argue when necessary. I will be willing to fight.
But it felt good to cry, to let her shoulders shake, to feel the hot tears on her face, to taste their baby salt, to wipe snot all over the underside of her shirt.
The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren’t operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?
So many people who wanted no part of all this. That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone – it’s a totalitarian nightmare.
There are times when I am concerned about Toph’s expression when I’m really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts and everything – an expression that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion – but I know well enough that it is awe.
Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.
This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little.
Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness.
The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned.
What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday.
Mokhtar and his friends would be working a hustle when one of them would look up. Isn’t that your pops, Mokhtar? His father circled his childhood as he circled the city – a kind of sixty-foot roaming conscience.
Next to the photo was a frown button that said “We denounce the Central Guatemalan Security Forces.” Mae hesitated briefly, knowing the gravity of what she was about to do – to come out against these rapists and murderers – but she needed to make a stand. She pushed the button.
Mae, so many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.