We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.
Walking is a pastime rather than an avocation.
There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.
The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, t...
The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from creative banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products desi...
The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe eve...
The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and
The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies...
The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.
Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a story...
Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happen...
Some portion of Woolf’s genius, it seems to me, is that having no notion, that negative capability. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the...
Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.
Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one's own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be...
Society’s recipes for fulfillment seem to cause a great deal of unhappiness, both in those who are stigmatized for being unable or unwilling to carry them out and in those who obey but don’t find happ...
Six years ago, when I sat down and wrote the essay Men Explain Things to Me, here’s what surprised me: though I began with a ridiculous example of being patronized by a man, I ended with rapes and mur...
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
One disturbing aspect of abuse and harassment is the idea that it’s not the crime that’s the betrayal but the testimony about the crime. You’re not supposed to tell. Abusers often assume this privileg...
Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.
Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have va...