Quotes from Eula Biss

I move one seat closer to the couple on the bus. They are holding hands but she is looking out her window and he is looking at his lap. They don't seem to be mad at each other.

I apologize for slavery. It wasn't me, true. But it might have been my cousin.

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." Meanwhile, life remains the ultimate privilege, the living lording over the dead.

We drove past our old house," the woman told me, "and I noticed that the tree he had watered through the droughts and cared for over the years had been cut down. He must have noticed too. I didn't say anything. I thought, 'I won't talk about it until he does,' but he didn't say a word.

Today I noticed a slim bar of soap lodged deep in the throat of the sink. My fingers can't reach that far down the drain. It is leaching away into the water, every day.

I regard the wheelbarrow full of fresh dirt resting above my unquiet grave. Now I'm in the hole I dug myself, I think with amusement. It feels like an accomplishment

I asked him for a bedtime story. I didn't really want a story, I just wanted him to talk to me. He couldn't think of anything. When I woke up he was gone but there was a letter on my bed that began, "So, you wanted a bedtime story….

Things with her, he says, were a disaster in slow motion.

Being a guest in someone else's home and slowly beginning to suspect that you have done something wrong, something of which you were not previously aware, is how it feels to have a dawning understanding of what it means to be white in this world.

When he says, "Why can't you follow a recipe?" I am hurt, because I know that he is not just asking why I can't be told what to do, but also why I can't let things be simple.

Attitudes toward the state easily translate into attitudes toward vaccination, in part because the body is such a ready metaphor for the nation.

The laws of water are very difficult. No matter how many times it is explained to me, I don't understand how the tides work. I know, of course, that water will seek a level. I know that it will only flow down.

I don't know…." He has been saying this over and over, ending every thought with it. Finally I ask him, "What don't you know?" He pauses. "Lots of things. Your favorite color, for example.

Whenever a tool is handled with ease and with a minimum of false motions, so that it will produce accurate and satisfactory results, it is handled in the right way. The constant aim of every carpenter, especially the apprentice, should be to eliminate false motions in everything he does." — Carpenter's Tools, H. H. Seigele

Sometimes he gives a little flourish with his fingers that makes me wonder if all his movements are a quiet performance.

Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity").

The idea of preventive medicine is faintly un-American," the Chicago Tribune noted in 1975. "It means, first, recognizing that the enemy is us.

The opportunity to think with another mind is my preferred mode of travel.

A trust-in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong-captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.

Art-making was part of my daily life from a very young age, and I still love that kind of everyday art-making.

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

There's something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.

If your child's going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn't do any of those things, then they're probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too.

Yes, we can make prudent choices as parents, but we can't create an environment where there's zero risk for our children. Not only is that impossible, I don't think it's desirable, either.