Quotes from Eula Biss

I'm afraid something will happen to my hands," he says, "I need my hands.

He is someone who believes he can break things, or he believes that anything can hurt him.

He thinks I don't pay attention. He has been talking and I have been silently naming the scents of everything we are crushing under our feet as we walk.

The game was informed by the theories of 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.

By the time I left New York, I knew that success and failure are silly terms in which to speak of living a life.

I come home to an empty house and fill the sink with water. The pigeons above the window are clucking. I let the dishes slip under the bubbles and I close my eyes. I listen to the perfect, whole, round sounds of glass against porcelain under water.

He hears his mother and his sister-in-law talk about how lonely it is to be married to a musician, how many nights they spend alone. He wonders if I would be unhappy. I don't say anything. I like to spend my nights alone.

range of chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breast milk might mean for the future of our children's health, we do at least know that we are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in ...our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

We are justified in feeling threatened by the unlimited expansion of industry, and we are justified in fearing that our interests are secondary to corporate interests. But refusal of vaccination undermines a system that is not actually typical of capitalism. It is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are shared across the entire population. Vaccination allows us to use the products of capitalism for purposes that are counter to the pressures of capital.

My mother was in the bathtub crying and I was standing outside the door waiting, just in case she decided to slip her head under and keep it there. The other kids were upstairs. The problem was about money, of course. She was afraid she wouldn't have enough for us to eat.

I was shaking when I asked my mother, "Do you think you eat enough?" She was silent for a long time until she said quietly, "That is between me and God.

I bent over, sick, and leaned my head against the softness of his stomach. He wrapped his arms around me, rocking gently. He said, "We should take you to the ocean, maybe that's what you need to feel better." He sang into my ear, under his breath. Silly songs. "That's the recipe for making love…

All sorts of risk-benefit analyses and models of herd immunity tend to produce the conclusion that vaccination benefits the individual as well as the public. When Harvard researchers recently used game theory to build a mathematical model of vaccination behavior during an influenza epidemic, they found that even "a population of self-interested people can defeat an epidemic." No altruism is required.

It is not that the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. It is that the heroine is not convinced she is the heroine or that the story is true. The heroine knows that New York is just a city-- just a place to live. And, like any other place, it demands that you make your own story.

the Pigouvian tax, a tax that's added to the price of a thing because of the social cost of that thing. Like the tax on cigarettes.

Women apologize as often to their friends as to strangers. Men rarely apologize to their friends. "Men," the linguist Janet Homes writes, "seem to avoid apologies where possible.

Art unmakes the world made by work.

Perhaps I will tell them that your race is like your name—it is a given, and you must define your own name so that it does not define you.

Meanwhile, when I walk home from the train station at night I watch unmarked cars pull in front of black teenagers, who are patted down quickly and wordlessly. Some of the teenagers, my husband observes, carry their IDs in clear cases hanging from their belts for easy access.

And as in any feudal system, the people on whom the entire system depended were robbed, as completely as possible, of their power. The students were, for the most part, unable to hold inept teachers accountable, to protest the wasting of their own time, to influence the grounds on which they would be evaluated, to demand anything, really, of substance from the institution.

Courts send black teenagers to jail for possession of marijuana, while white college kids are sentenced to community service for driving while intoxicated, a considerably more deadly offense. And Evangelicals editorialize about the sexual abominations of consenting adults, while very little is said about the plague of date rapes in college towns.

Clinton chose his language very carefully. About Rwanda, he said that, at the time, he "did not fully appreciate" the extent of the genocide. Not that he did not know. Because he did know. The Washington Post reported piles of bodies six feet high, and the evening news showed rivers choked with corpses. Regret, not action, had been his policy decision. Regret, he hoped, would not cost him anything.

We are not close," he said, and let the effect linger before he said, "We live five hundred miles apart.

I pause when the man at the register lays down a red carnation with my change, says quietly, "This is for you," and turns to the next customer. As I am starting my car I see another woman smiling and stepping into her car, holding a white carnation.