“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.” 

“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.”

“Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.” 

“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.” 

“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” 

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

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

Memory... is an internal rumor.

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

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

“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.” 

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

“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.” 

“Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.” 

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

“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.” 

“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.” 

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

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

“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!” 

“Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” 

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

I'm not a drinker, my body won't tolerate...eh...spirits, really. I had two martinis New Years Eve and I tried to hi-jack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.

I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.