On the traffic that runs both ways
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.”
The first sentence is ordinary. The second is the one that costs something: influence does not travel in one direction, and nobody arranges a life from outside it.
Butler puts this in the mouth of a girl inventing a religion in a collapsing country, which keeps it from being reassuring. Whatever you are working on is working on you at the same rate — the job, the argument, the person you are trying to help.