Barbara Ehrenreich Quote

What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here? I wanted them to come pouring out of their houses and cars calling out, Look at this! Just look at this! Do you see what I see? The strange juice rising in the grass and the trees, the great freely given, unearned beneficence of the sun? In my fantasy some of them would buttonhole strangers for the first serious conversations of their lives. Others would throw their arms out and their heads back and scream at the sky in alternating terror and ecstasy. Passersby would hug. Tears of recognition and amazement would be shed. It would be the end of loneliness and falsity and the beginning, after all these wasted years, of whatever it is we are supposed to be doing here. And if they didn’t want to respond so demonstratively, then all I asked was a wink here and there, a carefully folded note.

Barbara Ehrenreich

What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here? I wanted them to come pouring out of their houses and cars calling out, Look at this! Just look at this! Do you see what I see? The strange juice rising in the grass and the trees, the great freely given, unearned beneficence of the sun? In my fantasy some of them would buttonhole strangers for the first serious conversations of their lives. Others would throw their arms out and their heads back and scream at the sky in alternating terror and ecstasy. Passersby would hug. Tears of recognition and amazement would be shed. It would be the end of loneliness and falsity and the beginning, after all these wasted years, of whatever it is we are supposed to be doing here. And if they didn’t want to respond so demonstratively, then all I asked was a wink here and there, a carefully folded note.

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About Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (, AIR-ən-rike; née Alexander; August 26, 1941 – September 1, 2022) was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.