Great Throughts Treasury

"What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local."

"We?re also getting over the widespread sense that feminism was this historical phenomenon in the ?70s and ?80s and we won and everything?s beautiful and we can all shut the fuck up. Or it lost and we should all still shut the fuck up. There are so many theories about it that involve us all shutting up. But one of the things that?s interesting is how change on this front moves forward in what the the geologist Clarence King would have called punctuated equilibrium, in sudden jolts after long pauses. We have these periodic adjustments where we move forward again."

"What?s love got to do with it, asked Tina Turner, whose ex-husband Ike once said, ?Yeah I hit her, but I didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his wife.? A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It?s the number-one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a million of those injuries require medical attention while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for Disease Control, and you don?t want to know about the dentistry needed afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S."

"What?s your story? It?s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story."

"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown."

"When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing."

"When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains."

"Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of color?'"

"William Stegner... coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it."

"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."

"Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act."

"You can rescue someone from danger, but not from change and death; the soldier who survives the battle becomes someone else, something else, somewhere else. His war subsides; his memory fades; his nation ceases to exist; all but the elemental structures decay away; the very atoms that were once warring sides are now soil, trees, lovers, birds; all the medals are playthings for strangers; the cannons have been melted down and turned back into church bells that will become cannons again for another war."

"Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown."

"You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly."

"You don't have the memory of your future; the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine."

"You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found."