Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (1998), closing volume of the Border Trilogy. It’s less a lament than a diagnosis: the very act of bending the world to what’s convenient is what manufactures the paradoxes we then have to live inside. Wikiquote ran it as the July 20 Quote of the Day.