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215 pages, Hardcover
First published December 5, 2017
“Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.”
“To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.”
“If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.”![]()
“The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.”
“Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.”
“ You hear the anger in my tone? Anger indulged rouses anger. Yet anger suppressed breeds anger. What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?”
“Respect has often been overenforced and almost universally misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must respect all men, etc.). But when applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow. Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.”
"If we insist in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we've sacrificed right to might."
"Art is not a horse race."
"The creative adult is the child who survived."
"I want to say clearly that I do not believe any animal is capable of being cruel. Cruelty implies consciousness of another's pain and the intent to cause it. Cruelty is a human speciality, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it. We prefer to disown it, calling it "inhumanity", ascribing it to animals. We don't want to admit the innocence of the animals, which reveals our guilt."
"Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can't live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice."
Sure, politicians always lied, but Adolf Hitler was the first one who made it into a policy. American politicians didn’t use to lie as if they knew that nobody cared whether they lied or not, though Nixon and Reagan began testing those waters of moral indifference. Now we’re deep in them. What was appalling to me about Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate was that they were unnecessary. If he’d told the truth, he would have supported his candidacy better, as well as putting Romney’s faked figures and evasive vagueness to shame. He would have given us a moral choice instead of a fudge-throwing match.…so, the above passage caused me to raise my eyebrows in disappointment 5 separate times.
Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.
“meaning -- this is perhaps the common note, the bane i am seeking. what is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story ... ? tell me what it Means.
but that is not my job, honey. that's your job.”
This is clearly visible in the issue of abortion rights, where the steadfast nonviolence of rights defenders faces the rants, threats, and violence of rights opponents. The opponents would welcome nothing so much as violence in return. If NARAL vented rage as Tea Party spokesmen do, if the clinics brandished guns to defend themselves from armed demonstrators, the opponents of abortion rights on the Supreme Court would hardly have to bother dismantling Roe vs. Wade by degrees, as they're doing. The cause would already be lost.
As it is, it may suffer a defeat, but if we who support it hold firm it will never be lost.
—p.138
The banty rooster shrills: It-is-a-clarion-call! It-is-a-clarion-call! The big rooster exerts the unjustified superiority of a deeper voice. The hens pay no attention, scattering out, scudding along like sailboats over the grass. Now they begin to chatter, to gather back to the henyard: Gretchen has come out to scatter feed.
—"Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert," p.214
An angry bull goes for the red flag; an angry cow goes for the matador.Is someone to be reckoned with.
—footnote, p.70