“She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.” 

“Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.” 

“As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.” 

“More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.” 

“Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning” 

“I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.” 

“PLANNING AHEAD IS A measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.” 

“That’s why male adults, and some females too, experience the presence of a strong woman as a dangerous regression to a time of their own vulnerability and dependence.” 

“She didn’t put her finger to the wind; she became the wind.” 

“What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers. Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.” 

“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.” 

“Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman—perhaps especially a traveling feminist—becomes a kind of celestial bartender.” 

“Women have to learn how to talk as much as we listen. Men have to learn how to listen as much as they talk.” 

“American travel seems to need an advocate.” 

“Men can be just as loving and nurturing as women-- it's a libel on men to say they can't-- but we all learn by example. Boys just need nurturing men in their lives so they know it's okay for them to be nurturing.” 

“There is a healthier self within each of us, just wating for encouragement” 

“she seemed both proud and scared that I was where she had once wished to be.” 

“Change seems recognizable only after it’s happened, like putting one’s foot down for a familiar stair—and it’s not there.” 

“The media are not reality; reality is reality.” 

“Pound for pound, she was stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.” 

“I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.” 

“the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary,” 

“the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy” 

“Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.” 

“I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.” 

“Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, ‘I didn’t pay him to say that.’ ” 

“Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.” 

“Our current plight is not made inevitable by human nature. What once was could be again—in a new way.” 

“Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.” 

“would I have known that mystery leaves a space for us when certainty does not? And would I have dared to challenge rules later in life if my father had obeyed them?” 

“The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.” 

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

“Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?” 

“I'm not black on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and a woman on Thursday, Friday and Saturday” 

“we don’t know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But” 

“Everyone has a home but me.” 

“The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.” 

“There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.” 

“Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.” 

“MY LAST HOPE IS to open up the road—literally. So far it’s been overwhelmingly masculine turf. Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.” 

“Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.” 

“This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.” 

“Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.” 

“Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?”