“If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.”

If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.

I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.

Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.

if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?

“Legacy code” often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

I don’t really listen to a lot of 90s alternative indie female stuff anymore, but I loved Liz Phair and Kim Deal when I was younger.

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

I thought, well, why am I giving up on my primary dream to work doubly hard, to do something as an alternative to what it really still want to?

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don’t find them believable.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.