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"Children always feel they are the ones at fault," she said. "They think they are defective somehow, if everything is not just as it should be. But usually not. If there was a lot of love going on all through that house, I think you would feel it. You would know."

“But this belief, this absolute conviction that this evil they were doing was good, was God's work-how, she wondered, how could such a dark conviction ever be overcome?”

“when the light from the fire illuminated the creature, Jesus felt his blood turn to water.”

That story pulled tight in her chest, the particular grief of doing everything right and still losing. It was just a myth, but it rang true.
She thought she'd outgrown faith and wonder, but they found her again in that dusty corner of the library. The stories took her hand, and they led her home.
The rest of the world couldn't hurt her there.

“I hate that I have to use the tools of the people who broke this world to mend it”

“It changes everything. No more burning through relics for power. No more rolling blackouts in the lower city.”

“You want your discoveries to help people not just advance theory.”

"It sounds like you're caught between the path you were told to want and what you actually care about."

So I bear witness to my ancestors' legacy by carrying it forward. I'm not only my ancestors' wildest dream, I bear their great endowment, and of it I will proudly testity.

Matthew Desmond argues that the combination of these factors led America to rapidly expand the industry that enriched national coffers due to trade-offs in values and morals when it came to land and labor: "Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above."

The tree is also composed of the intermixed breath of the individuals who owned it and the many humans whom they enslaved, who toiled for hours outside in the tree's shadow and gifted the tree with countless molecules of carbon dioxide that now testify to their presence, their journeys, their dreams in the inner wood holding up this tree.

As poplars signal when a stressful encounter has occurred, to prepare the neighboring trees to protect themselves, we see that these trees can share information about damage and distress. It leaves one to wonder whether—or perhaps hope that-trees that bore strange fruit also "talk" to other trees about these tragedies.

“How strange it would be to want all the things I want for him for myself”

Nietzsche said, Amor fati. Love fate. You have to love what happened to you. I actually got that tattooed. When it truly clicks, no matter what the universe throws at you, you're like, Please, sir, I want some more. I'm not talking Wagyu beef and bearnaise, I'm talking the grand parade, the whole catastrophe, I'm talking life. You're like, Bring it on, motherfuckers. What else ya got?"

Chest tight, I throw out the first thing that pops into my head.
"I-I don't agree with the NFL's concussion protocol, a-a-and feel their return-to-participation policy lacks the necessary nonbiased third-party authority that might override a coach's decision to reinstate a player prematurely at the risk of that player damaging or losing vital cognitive ability later in life."

Kids are just people with different needs. I think I'm good at meeting needs. Trouble is, when you're a kid, you don't really know what those needs are. You trust your parents without knowing.

Mona's first stage was a flood of emotions, mostly despair. This time, it isn't despair coursing through me; it's regret. Remorse so deep, it cradles me like a grave. I thought loneliness was merely the sensation of feeling alone, but Mona shows me otherwise. It is a product of years. An ancient reckoning living dormant inside every molecule. This morning, Mona was out for my tears; this time, she's out for my blood

Watching them share space was like watching a pagan choreograph a moon dance with a nun. They disagreed at every turn. Even in childhood photos, they stood three feet apart.