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"I suspect that drink has made you impulsive."
"Drink makes me see funny; the gods made me impulsive."

Even small actions have consequences. And while we can often choose our actions, we rarely get to choose our consequences.

"What do you want?" As if that were a simple question to answer. People generally don't know what they want, though they almost uniformly hate being told what it should be.

But you can't run a landscape, any more than you can run your life, indefinitely in a state of emergency. To live your life, to live in your place, you have got to bring about a settlement that does not involve you continuously in worry, loss, and grief.

There is pleasure in the work of maintenance, the redemption of things worn or broken, that must go on almost continuously.

And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country.

But there can be no balance between freedom and secret police, universal suspicion, and tyranny. There is only a choice. If we have the courage, we will choose freedom, and we will use it to oppose our government's frivolous and dangerous secrecy, which it imposes upon us under the claim of "security" but really to hide its abuse of power and shame.

We have been so thoughtless and careless of our freedom for so long that by now we cannot see that our assumed right to be limitlessly violent would finally bring us to a violence against freedom that may destroy it.

Why should we continue to believe that our government is uniquely to be trusted with our weapons of mass destruction, whereas other nations are not to be trusted with theirs?

In the accounting of our wars, we speak often of the "human cost" to our side, the lives of young people spent, as we say, in defense of "our way of life." We speak little of the "human costs" and "collateral damages" paid by our enemies...But surely, by now, the official rationalizations of our violence have become too obviously hypocritical to be ignored.

"Everything is extraordinary about you, Tress," her mother said. "That's why nothing in particular stands out." Well, parents have to say things like that. They're required to see the best in their children, otherwise living with the little sociopaths would drive a person mad.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking the heat and even the courage of a personal hatred. Categorical hatred is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as at the crucifixion, and before, and since.

Oversimplified moral certainties—always requiring hostility, always potentially violent—isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous. The only perfect laws are absolute, but perfect laws are only approximately fitted to imperfect humans. This is why we have needed to think of mercy, and of the spirit, as opposed to the letter, of the law.

Jesus taught that hating your neighbor is tantamount to hating God, and yet some Christians hate their neighbors as a matter of policy and are busy hunting biblical justifications for doing so.

"It wasn't very practical," she whispered to her mother.
"Love rarely is," her mother replied.

An acceptable little poem, if you're the sort of barbarian who enjoys slant rhymes.

The locals worshipped those twelve moons as gods, which we can all agree is far more ridiculous than whatever it is you worship.

For the necessary political changes will be made only in response to changed people.

But responsibility for the better economy, the better life, belongs to us individually and to our communities.

It is not as though we have not been warned. The advice against waste, extravagance, selfishness, arrogance, falsehood, and willful ignorance is old. But people of religion have generally entrusted questions about economy, and about how we live, to economists and industrialists.

there is the implication of acceptable violence against the land and the people. We, on the contrary, must think again of severance, humility, affection, familiarity, neighborliness, cooperation, thrift, appropriateness, local loyalty. These terms return is to the best of our heritage. They bring us home.

Without a saving connection to the land, people become useless to themselves and to one another except by intervention of money. Everything they need must be bought. Things they cannot buy they do not have.

I am talking about the connection that we make economically, by work, by living, by making a living. This connection, as we see every day, is going to be either familiar, affectionate, and saving, or distant, uncaring, and destructive.

We must not speak of the land alone or of the people alone, but always and only of both together. If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to.

The story of industrialization is the same story everywhere, and everywhere the result is ruin.

"Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn't there."

"...life would and must go on, even if altogether new and subject to a grief that would be present with every step."

"The good sadness, I think, is always trying to tell us something very important."

"The young man proudly names his scars for his lover, the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole."

"The testimony of experts bears out the same point: it's rough out there."