Word collection.

Chapter 1 (Audible chapter 3)-

[on the adult ADHD mind]

1:09 - 

May you find comfort in your identity instead of seeking safety in other people’s.

May you learn to visit other people’s worlds without feeling compelled to build a home in them.

But I closed my eyes, subdued and I went deep

Deep into endless sleep

My limbs yours and your limbs stuck

I'd always promised I'd keep my own compass

It felt good to give up

But your judgements are heavy

And they're hurting me'

“’I am French’, he replied, admiring the dew on his half-raised glass, ‘I am gay, I am Jewish, and I am a criminal, more or less in that order. Bombay is the only city I have ever found that allows me to be all four of those things, at the same time.”

p.51 (Didier)

“A lot of the bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it” p.97 (Karla) / “Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.” (p. 367)

“Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.”

p. 229

“I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportionate to the size of our house.”

p.244 (Karla)

“He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. and as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day’s gift.”

p.325 (about Prabaker)

“I also felt a sudden rush of affection for him, an affection that seemed to proceed from and depend upon the inequalities between us. It was vassal love, one of the strongest and most mysterious human emotions.”

p.322

“Every virtuous act we take has some dark secret at its heart.”

P.415 (Khaderbai)

“Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.

You know that’s true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it’s true when you watch them die. If he’s near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in this hand. If he can, he’ll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he’s a long way from home, he’ll think about it, and he’ll talk about it. He’ll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won’t scream of causes. At the very last, he’ll murmur or he’ll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.”

p.741

“But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood.... I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.”

p.837

“Oh, please!’ he shuddered, stubbing out a cigarette and fishing another from the pack in front of him as the coughs subsided. ‘There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call - I almost never recovered.’

p. 545 (Didier)

“It is always a fools mistake, Didier once said to me, to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved.”

“It’s about how the first step to slaying a dragon is for one person to say, probably drunk and in a bar somewhere, “I bet it can be done, though.” p.123

“the need for writers and filmmakers to take a stand against nostalgia and create ‘a radical engagement with the future’. ‘Engaging with the future.... imagining that we are willing to author it together as opposed to having it given to us, is important. And “radical” is to say that we should be ambitious and slightly crazy and idiosyncratic about how we think that future could be” P.124

“As the economist Milton Friedman once wrote: ‘Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

P. 127

“Our stories need to try to speak to our deep memories, our bone memory, the things that fundamentally move and touch people, that really resonate.”

p.128

“The way to respond to this stuff is to imagine what we want as opposed to constantly reacting to what we do not want... the way in which we envision this world should be what’s in the centre of the room, all the time, as opposed to the broken stuff always entering and centring in the room.”

p.188, top.

“It is my hope that this book might prompt a reconsidering of the strategies used by organisations and campaigns working in responses to the challenges we are facing, that they might work to make sure the expression of a positive vision of how the future could turn out, their dream of it, comes through loudly, imaginatively and passionately in all that they do. They physicist and writer Peter Russell once described this cultivation of a collective vision to me as acting like a strange attractor in chaos theory, something you throw in front of yourself which then draws you towards it, like a whirlpool. While many of the technologies, economic models and know-how for creating a future in which we can all thrive already exist, what is missing is the longing. Imagination is so important because it helps us create longing, and if we can get that right, other things then follow.”

“I dream that these twenty years when the climate crisis, the collapse of the world’s biodiversity, the unravelling of democracy and the multitude of other challenges converging on us with great urgency have been slowed down and even turned around, the years when the great rebuilding is well under way, will be the time of our lives. I dream that because imagination is at it’s heart, it will be a time of great music, great writing, great conversation, great art, great dancing. Our streets will fill with play and with the unexpected, with mime artists directing the traffic. Our lives will fill with everyday awe. 

Our governments will learn from schools like Plymouth School of Creative Arts that great leaps forward come when people are invited to work with those in other areas of interest, to cross-pollinate ideas. Our town planners will realise that putting ateliers at the heart of High Streets and public places will transform the public’s sense of what’s possible. I dream that artists and activists will, together, create visceral pop-up experiences of the future, overnight transforming unloved but well-known places into immersive experiences (or ‘memories of the future’), new jungles of possibility atop the paving stones of today which, once tasted, mean no one will be happy to go back to how it was before.”

“Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.”

“It’s like an improv skit,” Krivchenia says, “Saying no fucking kills the skit.”

I was very averse to landing on a “take” in this book, but if I were to extract one now, it would be that what the climate crisis requires of us—morally, but also for survival—is to massively expand the bounds of our attention and our love. This isn’t a woo-woo thing; it’s the deepest pragmatism. We have an ecological gun to our head. If we’re not able to pay attention, as a polity, to those people who have been made invisible, and to the many species that have been made invisible—let alone the inorganic circuitry that runs our environment, like the seasons, the oceans, and even things like rates of sedimentation—if we’re not able to encompass all of that in the sphere of what we really do care about and treat it all not as externalities to be sacrificed or saved, but as indivisible and constituent parts of what we are, then we’re going to go down in flames.

“Liquid hydrogen will come in and save us all.” Hope is knowing that every increment we move the thermometer in one direction or the other saves or consigns millions of people to life or death. I can’t imagine higher stakes than that. And I can’t imagine anything that would invest a human life with more meaning than that struggle.

But this is a frustration I often have with the left: If an ethical principle isn’t paired with a rigorous strategy that would make it manifest in the world, then it’s more like a thought experiment than a tool for improving the lives of working people.

The climate movement of my dreams would support people moving through each stage of their life. There would be infrastructure to organize parents around this, infrastructure to organize empty nesters and retirees, each as meaningful and vivid as what it means to be a high schooler in Sunrise right now. 

intergenerational solidarity,

Exploiting Scientist’s Kryptonite: Certainty

7.52 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JimMROaBxQ

8.20 in: