In the context of the California wildfires, and now earthquakes, I thought I’d share one of my favorite quotes ever:

Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy the disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. [Don Delillo, White Noise]

So great.

Side note: I love how Twitter has been used as an emergency response tool in the wildfires. And, how did I learn an earthquake just occurred an hour ago? From twitter, of course. See the feed that informed me below: