“It’s more eerie to be alone in a city that’s lit up and functioning than one that’s a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards.”

“The sixteen hundred dairies in California’s Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that’s more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined.”

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”

“That’s who I am to you from now on. No more Lachlan. No more pretending”

“It’s always our mistakes, the things we aren’t proud of, that are the first ones to stand up, ready to be counted. That’s human nature and it’s not going to change, not for me or for you, either.”

“More things we learned from the Rising: It’s hard to gentrify a city that’s on fire.”