Quotes from Eula Biss

I realized this is what white people do to each other—they cultivate each other's fear. It's very violent.

We shouldn't ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

As one Chicago real-estate magazine puts it: "For decades, a low rate of owner occupancy, a lack of commercial development … and problems with crime have kept prices lower in East Rogers Park than in many North Side neighborhoods." And so my feelings about fear are somewhat ambivalent, because fear is why I can afford to swim every day now.

The word "pioneer" betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West—the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.

Henry George, who proposed that profits made from a natural resource, like land or coal or oil, should be distributed equally among everyone. No individual, he argued, should build a fortune by laying claim to a collective resource. George believed that everyone was entitled to profit from their labor, but that profits made from the ownership of property should be heavily taxed. The woman who invented the Landlord's Game, Elizabeth Magie, was an advocate of that tax.

Mother: "I'm amazed that more people don't commit suicide. They just keep on living. It's so hard and they just keep doing it." Useful

We believe that modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and contaminated it with certain viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS," the chairman of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria maintained, urging parents to refuse vaccination.

Precocity is not the price of riding a bicycle, I think, so much as what it has to offer. Wind, a rush of blood, fissures and pits in the asphalt, an errant animal, eyes in a mirror, glint of sunlight on chrome, scent of lake water, catcalls, a soaring feeling. But that is not to say that liberation doesn't have a price.

Mother: "He used to say that you could lock me in a closet and I'd still get something out of it. I guess that's true." An

We don't have to privilege accumulation over distribution. But that is the rule that governs our everyday lives—our work and our play.

When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me.

When the last nationwide smallpox epidemic began in 1898, some people believed that whites were not susceptible to the disease. It was called "Nigger itch," or, where it was associated with immigrants, "Italian itch" or "Mexican bump." When

Opportunity hoarding is the term for this, and it takes the form of admissions procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking, and all sorts of credentialing.

Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive. When

Mother (over and over again): "What you have to understand about men is that they aren't like us. They don't have feelings." My

Nearly all people in nearly all nations, for nearly all of human history, he observes, have been poor. Widespread poverty is not an anomaly. But widespread affluence is.

She talks to herself as she hollows out a stoneware bowl. She is saying something about containment. She talks to her dogs and to the chickens. She has said so many things that have gone unheard. Off the record. Mother:

This is the year that everyone is trying to fly around the world in a balloon. I don't know why.

Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity

I wake up afraid that she will be taken and folded up in a closet like clean linen.

I think I remember him saying that the problem with a tire fire is that it can smolder for years, burning quietly but uncontrollably.

many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children

You know, she used to tear down parts of that house and put them back together herself.