“Anybody can be with you when you’re right, but only friends are with you when you mess up.” 

“In the words of so many daughters who don’t yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I’m not going to be anything like my mother.” 

“In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.” 

“You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel -- yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.” 

“Then, as if in answer to a riddle posed years before, you will realize that this growth came from seeds you planted or watered or carried from place to place—and you’ll be rewarded in the way that we as communal beings need most: you’ll know you made a difference.” 

“Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.” 

“IF EVERYONE HAS A full circle of human qualities to complete, then progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.” 

“people in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn’t possible on the page or screen.” 

“Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of 'everybody has a home but me'. I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of 'either/or', I discovered a whole world of 'and'.” 

“Beware of any motto that glorifies the past. It’s code for restoring hierarchy. For example: “Make America great again.” 

“I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And” 

“Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.” 

“Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?” 

“White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.” 

“There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.” 

“the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then,” 

“If time is relative, doing new things actually makes us feel we’ve lived a longer life.” 

“I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense—and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?” 

“I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I'd had years before. Like many women, I'd been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.” 

“As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun.” 

“Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.” 

“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!”