It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women — a new job, a new town, a divorce — which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.

Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations - the way people are going to live, the way they think, further. She had no illusions about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen. Yet there’s purpose in the attempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? - even if it is renamed empowerment.

The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.