What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are, most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights, as conservatives have in most states of the union...
We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without...
We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters. The revolt agai...
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.
The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live...
Taking care of the elderly comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitments, notably romantic love and childbearing. It sneaks up on you as som...
Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can’t so easily be blown down in the wind. St...
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.
Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story h...
Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.
It’s the way some men say, I’m not the problem or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exas...
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe t...
I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we alw...
For it’s particularly when women speak up about sexual crimes that their right and capacity to speak come under attack. It seems almost reflexive at this point, and there is certainly a very clear pat...
Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan’s new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that cru...
[Cabeza de Vaca] ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.