So Unlikely

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.
—Rebecca Solnit

Depends

Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
—Ted Chiang

Safety

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
—Joseph Conrad

Barely

While we understand, somehow, that this is precisely what love is—that the china bowl is beautiful precisely because it will break, that we love each other because we do not live forever—we can barely imagine what that means.
—Sallie Tisdale

By Design

A capitalist system automatically includes racism, whether by design or not. Capitalism and racism go hand in hand.
—Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)

Transformation

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered.
—Rebecca Solnit

Sin

Like everything else that we have, science has known sin. There is no such thing as a human enterprise that is not riddled with error and crime. We carry that evolutionary baggage with us wherever we go.
—Ann Druyan

More than

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
—George Orwell [04.06.10]

If you don't mind

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti [11.16.11]

Learn

Quarantine teaches me what I've already been taught, but I'll never learn—that there are so many other ways to be lonely besides the particular way I am lonely.
—Leslie Jamison

Money

Money is a very useful imaginary concept we invented. It's a tool. It exists to help us. We don't exist to help it.
—A.R. Moxon

In love

We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made,
In love we disappear.
—Leonard Cohen

History

There is no period so remote as the recent past.
—Alan Bennett (The History Boys)

Home

The shell of home is a prison of sorts, as much as a protection, a casing of familiarity and continuity that can vanish outside.
—Rebecca Solnit

Failure

Failure is just another name for much of real life: much of what we set out to accomplish ends in failure, at least in our own eyes.
—Margaret Atwood

Ordinary

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world. We can do this even at the most difficult moments.
—Pema Chödrön

Listening

Listening isn't that complicated. It's hard, but it's not complicated.
—Sallie Tisdale

Costs

Hunger has both moral and political costs.
—Amy Davidson (January 2016)