Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman – how would you divide the housework?
Voting isn’t the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.
Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.
More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.
But why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you take my sister and go to New York?” she would say it didn’t matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, “If I’d left, you never would have been born.” I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.
We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176.
Don’t write when you’re angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don’t.
When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.
Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.
In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious – whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.
In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.
That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.
A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.
Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.
I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don’t express it, we loose faith in ourselves.
It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.
All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.
No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t.
As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.