It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free...
Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ‘were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at...
This work will only mater if it's sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren't immediate or ob...
Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives...
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his deh...
Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.
For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of t...
For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart. There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering...
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.
Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.
Some people love their story that much even if it's of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don't know how to stop telling it. Maybe it's about loving coherence more than com...
I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It want...
To which I’d like to append a variation on Lewis’s Law (all comments on feminism justify feminism): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women...
What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud...
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...
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak...
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
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...
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