“Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” 

“On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.” 

“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

“Always look at what people do, not who they are.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.” 

“I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.” 

“We learn most where we know the least.” 

“I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.” 

“What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.” 

“We are all trained to be female impersonators.” 

“The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” 

“I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.” 

“Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.” 

“We are so different, yet so much the same.” 

“Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home.” 

“Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.” 

“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” 

“It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.” 

“I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.” 

“YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING

“Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” 

“Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.” 

“According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What” 

“Sometimes when I'm in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, 'Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.” 

“We need to unlearn our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves. It's worth taking time to demistify it. [...] All the things an adolescent can be [...] are reduced to a three digit number. [...] We too can decide how to value our education instead of letting them value us.” 

“the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

“If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.” 

“I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.” 

“I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.” 

“I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.” 

“And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.” 

“Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.” 

“I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.” 

“At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much—and I’m using it to light the torches of others.” 

“Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.” 

“hate generalizes, love specifies” 

“This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.” 

“Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.” 

“More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.” 

“We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176” 

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.” 

“I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way.” 

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.” 

“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.” 

“In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.”

“In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” 

“That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.” 

“Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.” 

“I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.”