The Overstory: A Novel

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

But the humans have her in their grip, and she’ll never get free again.

Singing is now everything. It follows on a line of hobbies she has hit hard in the hopes of passing the week as maximally as possible.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

“The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, it will follow wherever you go.” He gives the third ring to his son, who asks, “What kind of tree?”

You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

She pops out into the pond’s clearing. The starry sky erupts above her, all the explanation a person needs for why humans have waged war on forests forever. Dennis has told her what the loggers say: Let’s go let a little light into that swamp. Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky.