Stories matter. They can trap us, but they can also inspire us.

It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. — Alan Rickman

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on eart

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story.