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

“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.”

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

“Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.” 

“I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news” 

“Rhyming in itself is magic.” 

“Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, “But I just looked an hour ago!” 

“After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.” 

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.” 

“If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.” 

“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. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.” 

“If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.” 

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.” 

“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group.” 

“I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” 

“There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.” 

“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.” 

“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.” 

“The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.” 

“The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.” 

“I’m not sure we can understand another country if we don’t understand our own.”