Status Updates From The Faraway Nearby

We divide up the world as though there were real borders rather than delicately shaded degrees between the crazy and the same, the good and the destructive

Pain serves a purpose. Without it, you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers into it… They are, ideally, places where nothing happens, and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens into another world… engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish. (Flight)

“You can speak as though your life is a thread, a narrative unspooling in time, and a story is a thread, but each of us is an island from which countless threads extend out into the world” (144)