“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.” 

“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness

Memory... is an internal rumor.

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

“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.” 

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

“To know your future you must know your past”

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”

“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”

“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.” 

“It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” 

“As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”