The Anthropocene Reviewed Quotes

“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

“I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.”

“You can’t see the future coming--not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

“For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”

“When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes - often, in fact - you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

“When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding.”

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.”

“I...took some pride in ‘not fulfilling my potential,’ in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t actually have that much potential.”

“Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit.”

“I am thoughtful—full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless—acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine.”

“our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.”