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...Staying apolitical - by which I mean, not working for policy change that would make life better for everyone and not just those who shed their earthly material belongings - made communes look like a curiosity, a relic.

— No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy (Page 77)

I would prefer to buy My pens from my local pharmacy than order them on Amazon, because one of these contributes to my neighbourhood and the other union-busts and underpass it's own employees, who've worked hard enough over the years to help founder Jeff Bozos fly to space for some reason. The same principle stands when it comes to food: why would I support massive agricultural and biotech conglomerates who underpay workers and also don't pay the real environmental cost of their pesticide-heavy, monocrop practices instead of supporting my local community?

— No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy (Page 34)

Down into the earth where dead men go I would go soon and maybe come out of it again in some healthy way, free and innocent of all human perplexity. I would be the chill of an April wind, an essential part of some indominatable river or be personally concerned in the ageless perfection of rank mountain bearing down on the mind by occupying forever a position in the blue distance. Or perhaps a smaller thing like movement in the grass on an unbearable breathless yellow day, some hidden creature going about it's business - I might well be responsible for that or some part of it. Or even those unaccountable distinctions that make an evening recognisable from its own morning, the smells and sounds and sights of the perfected and matured essences of the day, these might not be innocent of my meddling and my abiding presence.

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 164)

Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day - mild, Magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things.

— The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (Page 156)

We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers we should remember the seahorse and we should scream with awe and we should not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.

— The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell (Page 124)

Once, the trees from which the wood came, the fields from which grain came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and the producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialisation, urbanisation, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel ( in our time if not in Orwell's with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits - a more stimulating and various mental life - but they came at a cost. The places, plants, animals, materials, and objects that had once been as well known as friends and family had become strangers, as had the people who worked with these materials. Things appeared from beyond the horizon, from beyond knowing, and knowing was an act of volition instead of part of everyday life.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 209 - 210)

Those obsessed with productivity and injustice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It's a doing something who's value and results are not so easily quantified or comodified, and you could argue that any and every evasion of quantify ability and comodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities and oversimplification.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 191)

There is of course, a meaningful difference between the dour (and widespread) position that we are forever starting from scratch because everything is contaminated or corrupt and the position that the good exisits as a kind of seed that needs to be tended more energetically or propagated more widely.

— Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Page 193)