No single human can work to save the orcas and protect the Amazon and organize anti-fracking protests and write poetry that inspires others to act and pray in a hermit’s dwelling for transformation and get dinner on the table. How easy is it to feel paralyzed by obligations.

The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth.

Fear is generous and does not exclusively live in the hearts of mortals.

Can you imagine the colonized fighting on behalf of the colonizer to protect the colonizer from being colonized?

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

But power isn’t wisdom, and after 100,000 years of discoveries, inventions, and conquests humanity has pushed itself into an existential crisis.

We live a life dominated by stress and are too busy to really take notice of who we are, where we are going and what we want from life. We are now at a moment where technology will disrupt our minds and bodies more than we can begin to imagine.

No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.

We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light.

When fear stops us from asking questions, it stops us from solving treatable problems.

Diagnosis is a gatekeeping process, and it slams its heavy bars in the face of anyone who is too poor, too busy, too Black, too feminine, too queer, and too gender nonconforming, among others.

I'm a huge believer that, as long as you’re still alive and your heart beats in your chest, you can change, you can improve, you can influence, you can motivate, you can build, and you can do better.

How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.

“The clearest evidence that justice is the most important of all the virtues comes from what happens when you remove it. It’s remarkably stark: The presence of injustice instantly renders any act of virtue—courage, discipline, wisdom—any skill, any achievement, worthless…or worse.”

The unsaid thing about funerals is that directly after the communal mourning for someone you love, after everyone is gone and the connected grief dispersed, comes a solitude beyond imagining. A great, gaping nothing where a whole person and life and future used to be. The other side of a funeral is abyss.

Because broken hearts strip vocabularies down to their raw bones…

When Kyra makes all the males disappear, she must choose her sister who hates her or the man who loves her.

No one keeps every book they read, which means the ones we do keep are important. A person’s library is like a fingerprint.

“Grief can change a person to the point where they become someone they don’t know, or even like very much. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

The great promise of gene editing is that it will transform medicine. The peril is that it will widen the healthcare divide between rich and poor.