CHOOSING COMMUNITY OVER TECHNOLOGY

'To this day, if you say you would be willing to forbid, restrict, or reduce the use of technological devices in order to protect the community - or to protect the good health of nature on which the community depends - you will be called a Luddite, and it will not be a compliment. To say that the community is more important than machines is certainly Christian and certainly democratic, but it is also Luddism and therefore not to be tolerated.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.131.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DESTROY

'If you destroy the ideal of the "gentle man" and remove from men all expectations of courtesy and consideration towards women and children, you have prepare the way for an epidemic of rape and abuse. If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between these two people but as a bond between these two people and their forbears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.125.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

'It's everything that matters against everything that mustn't be allowed to matter.'

Geoffrey Faber in Toby Faber, Faber & Faber: The Untold Story, p.158.

AGE-BASED WORRY

'Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?'
Jenny Offill, Weather, p.21

BOOKS AS PORTABLE ISLANDS

'...often in adult life I've considered books as portable islands, in the way they grant isolation from one's surroundings, offering relief from immediate demands and space for contemplation.'

Gavin Francis, Island Dreams, p.80.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GROWN-UP PERSON

'André Malraux, the French novelist, adventurer and Resistance fighter, relates in his Anti-Memoirs what a priest felt a lifetime of hearing confessions has taught him (an assessment that could just as easily have been uttered by a physician as a priest).

"First of all people are much more unhappy than one thinks...and then..." He raised his brawny lumberman's arms in the starlit night; "And then, the fundamental fact is that there is not such thing as a grown-up person."'

Gavin Francis, Island Dreams, p.28. 

THE HEALING POWER OF ISLANDS

'...through adolescence, medical school, and working as a doctor in specialty training, it began to dawn on me that I sought out islands to recalibrate my sense of what matters. Their absence of connection, their isolation, was therapeutic in a way I found difficult to articulate.'

Gavin Francis, Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession, p.18.

THE POLICING OF SEXUALITY

'...not long ago conservatives policed discourse concerning human sexuality, today liberal voices have replaced them. The only thing that has remained constant is the presence of policing.'

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: the transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy, p.19.

THE CHALLENGE OF FORGIVENESS

'At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do? Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them increased scrutiny of any kind? Maybe I'm wrong, but I do believe the number of people who have done seriously bad things is not insignificant. I mean honestly, I think that if every man who has ever behaved somewhat poorly in a sexual context dropped dead tomorrow, there would be like eleven men left alive. And it's not only men! It's women too, and children, everyone. I suppose what I mean is, what if it's not only a small number of evil people who are out there, waiting for their bad deeds to be exposed? What if it's all of us?'

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, p.135.

THE PUZZLING POWER OF SEXUALITY

'It seems to me we walk around all the time feeling these absurdly strong impulses and desires, strong enough to make us want to ruin our lives and sabotage our marriage and careers, but nobody is really trying to explain what the desires are, or where they come from. Our ways of thinking and speaking about sexuality seem so limited, compared to the exhausting and debilitating power of sexuality itself as we experience it in our real lives.'

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, p.92.