“We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempts to survive our deaths...The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever.”

“I don’t find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life—we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.”

“We had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at that time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.”

“those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”