We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.
We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thought...
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a...
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world show...
To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your...
There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.
The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic,...
The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.
The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow, [Woolf] writes. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four a...
Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the...
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are wh...
Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.
Nearly every book has the same architecture--cover, spine, pages--but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power. Some book...
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who...
Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.
I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm, maybe it was the only way she could break away from her mother, maybe D...
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on t...