We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.
Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.
I am a mother, she thought – not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity.
What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?
And you can’t force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence.
How do children do that? Jacob wondered. Not only enter rooms silently, but at the worst possible moment.
Jacob was right when, after Sam’s injury, he said it was too much love for happiness.
I will walk without noise and I will open the door in darkness and I will.
They lay in silence, thinking their own thoughts, each trying to know the other’s. They were becoming strangers on top of each other.
The Gypsy girl carved love letters into trees, filling the forest with notes for him.
Little was known, which made what little was known terrifying.
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
Fish are divided from us by surfaces and silence.
According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.
Look, I’m not always right. I realize that. But I’m always strong.
But that slip of paper wouldn’t disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.
TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with baby animals when doing publicity for something he’s selling, but you’ll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he’d electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, I wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch.
Is God sad? He would have to exist to be sad, wouldn’t He? I know, she said, giving his shoulder a little slap. That’s why I was asking, so I might finally know if you believed! Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal to be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.
But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it.
Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.