Quotes from Eula Biss

In France, a law now requires large companies not to expect their employees to send or respond to emails after work hours.

I begin my days by practicing piano, which I do badly but with ardor. Then I read for a while. I write until I'm too hungry to keep writing and then after lunch I spend some time in my garden before writing again. I want to also study French, but I rarely do. As I meander my way through one of these days, it occurs to me that my work life resembles the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.

Maintenance is the tax I pay on this life, I think. And that is why I want to do it by hand, with heavy shears.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies," Binyamin Appelbaum writes, "is that the average American's life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

A poem is something that happens between people, O'Hara insisted in his manifesto for Personism

Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.

We do not know alone. Dracula

One of the most frightening things about children, in my experience, is their intelligence. They inevitably know more than we suspect them of knowing. They appraise us with devastating accuracy. And they are aware of injustices we have learned to ignore.

Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt—a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.

Caretaking, she suggests, is not an inherent threat to liberty. "From a feminist, caring framework," Peterson writes, "liberty is not defined as complete separation and independence from the parent." If fathering still reminds us of oppressive control, mothering might help us imagine relationships based not just on power, but also care.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?" the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. "They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders." Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.

Mother: "Rumi wrote that…roughly…the only thing that will be with you to your grave is your work. Only your work will speak for you after you're gone." There

There are some words that seem to well up from inside me without reason. I will be walking along an empty hallway, leaning against the wall of an elevator, looking at the ceiling of my apartment when I find myself saying, "sorry." But I am not saying it to anyone else, it is only for the sound of the word, the feel of it.

Words like 'custody' don't mean the same thing to him. I don't want us to own anything together. "You don't want to be happy," he accuses me.

The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.

I think you should define the word 'gentrification,'" my husband tells me now. I ask him what he would say it means, and he pauses for a long moment. "It means that an area is generally improved," he says finally, "but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.

The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.

Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.

I once met a man of pro-football-sized proportions who saw something in my hesitation when I shook his hand that inspired him to tell me he was pained by the way small women looked at him when he passed them on the street—pained by the fear in their eyes, pained by the way they drew away—and as he told me this, tears welled up in his eyes.

Consider relationships of dependence,' my sister suggests. 'You don't own your body- that's not what we are, our bodies aren't independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.' She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. 'I don't even know how to talk about this,' she says. 'The point is there's an illusion of independence.

When I started riding a bike I realized there's a real relationship between a body powering itself going down the street and the way you interact with your community," Smith says. "The violence of the power of a car is an alienating device. It's the last thing we need in our neighborhoods.

I had, a decade earlier, read through 2,354 New York Times articles reporting lynchings between 1880 and 1920, so the events of the past year were less startling to me than the persistence, for well over a century, of the notion that the routine murder of black men is necessary for our collective safety.

Speaking of privilege, David said when he gave me her biography, it is a privilege to spend your life writing. Not a luxury, he clarified, but a privilege.