Luxury is a weakness.

There’s such happiness in a successful escape.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

There’s the idea of wilderness, and then there’s the unglamorous labor of it,

“I had such romantic visions of going to sea,” he said, “as a boy, I mean. You know, see the world, that kind of thing. Turns out most of the world looks very much like a series of interchangeable container ports.” “And yet you’re still here.” “I’m still here. One gets sucked in.

Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from New

Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

There’s a flock of swans on a lake in the deepening autumn. As the nights grow colder, they all fly away. Except one, for reasons Alkaitis can’t remember: a lone swan who doesn’t perceive the approaching danger or loves the lake too much to leave even though it’s clearly time to go or is afflicted by hubris—the swan’s motivations were hazy and, Alk

“There’s the question of the new Panamax vessels,” Miranda said. There was a collective sigh. The company had commissioned two new ships back in the lost paradise of 2005, when the demand had seemed endless and they were struggling to keep up, and the ships—under contract, paid for, two and a half years into the building process, and now extravagan