I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?
His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn’t want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was a principle of marriage she’d explained many times.
You and I are not like other people. We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty... When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.
I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.
The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.
A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.
Lately whenever I’d scratched somebody’s surface I’d turned up a ghost story.
Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.
Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I’m counting them as blessings?
I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.
When I was Turtle’s age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn’t. Maybe I hadn’t started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.
When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.
Questioning our government’s actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure.
They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.
I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.” Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?” “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.
I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” “If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.
But if we can’t summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation’s hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.
This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.
I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.