Women academics from Canada

"Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."

"The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love."

"A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you."

"I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown."

"He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts."

"He had that faint sick look in his eyes, as if he wanted to give her something, charity for instance."

"The policemen's faces glisten too, they're holding themselves back, they love this, it's a ceremony, they're implementing a policy."

""Why do men feel threatened by women?" I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, "a male friend of mine." It's often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but don't want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you aren't one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. "A male friend of mine" also gives — let us admit it — a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. "I mean," I said, "men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power." "They're afraid women will laugh at them," he said. "Undercut their world view." Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, "Why do women feel threatened by men?" "They're afraid of being killed," they said."

"Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."

"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space."

"An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness."

"Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it."

"War is what happens when language fails."

"Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur."

"I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more."

"I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart."

"I can tell you that once upon a time when I was doing public events people would ask me, "What do you think about the arts?, What do you think of the role of women?, What do you think of men?, What do you think of all of these things?", and now they ask one thing, and that one thing is this, "Is there hope?""

"I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty."

"I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked. … and they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!"

"[In the end] The Handmaid's Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job."

"The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?"

"Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targetsand you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset."

"I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through."

"When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others."

"I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn."

"In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres"

"In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal."

"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."

"Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one."

"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum."

"Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

"You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth."

"These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men."

"The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes."

"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when."

"Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes."

"A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women."

"You can think clearly only with your clothes on."

"He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."

"I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real."

"(She is reciting the Lord’s prayer) Now we come to forgiveness. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves."

"You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some."

"Freedom, like everything else, is relative."

"A movie about the past is not the same as the past."

"By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are."

"As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day."

""Better never means better for everyone." The Handmaid's Tale (TV Series 2017)"

"She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history."

"To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror."

"In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman."

"She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry?"

"You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal."

"He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history."

"My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror."

"He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice."

"Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare."

"The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it."

"NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her. —Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770"

"There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on."

"Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary."

"If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror."

"In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or, having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. These are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons, lovers, and so forth. All the killed children."

"Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win."

"Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right — though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them."

"In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches."

"I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war."

"It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?"

"I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault."

"The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field, not because I was sports-minded or had plans to smoke a cigarette behind the field house — the only other reason for going there — but because this was my normal way home from school. I was scuttling along in my usual furtive way, suspecting no ill, when a large invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed. It was quite a gloomy poem: the poems of the young usually are. It was a gift, this poem — a gift from an anonymous donor, and, as such, both exciting and sinister at the same time. I suspect this is the way all poets begin writing poetry, only they don't want to admit it, so they make up more rational explanations. But this is the true explanation, and I defy anyone to disprove it."

"I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me."

"As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional."

"My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb, I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an assortment of my high school female friends, in the cafeteria one brown-bag lunchtime, that I was going to be a writer. I said "writer," not "poet;" I did have some common sense. But my announcement was certainly a conversation-stopper. Sticks of celery were suspended in mid-crunch, peanut-butter sandwiches paused halfway between table and mouth; nobody said a word. One of those present reminded me of this incident recently — I had repressed it — and said she had been simply astounded. "Why?," I said. "Because I wanted to be a writer?" "No," she said. "Because you had the guts to say it out loud.""

"The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian. It would have been worse if I'd been a boy, though. Never mind the fact that all the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death — poetry was thought of as existing in the pastel female realm, along with embroidery and flower arranging. If I'd been male I would probably have had to roll around in the mud, in some boring skirmish over whether or not I was a sissy."

"I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite"

"After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight"

"Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time."

"A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some."

"I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. Wordsworth was sort of right when he said, "Poets in their youth begin in gladness/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness." Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work — giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them — and part of it is cultural expectation — "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too. But when I find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift."

"Her mother volunteered that the thing about people from another culture was that you could never tell whether they were insane or not because their ways were so different."

"She attracted people he called "sponges"."

"It must be said at the outset that the field of mental illness has always been debatable ground. Who is sane, who isn't, and who is qualified to judge? Standards have fluctuated wildly, and abuses have been numerous. In the last century, in the United States, a wife could be committed to an asylum on the say-so of her husband and two easily-paid-off doctors alone, and there are cases on record of wives who were "put away" for holding theological opinions that differed from those of the husband, or for refusing to have as much sex as he would like."

"That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true."

"For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books."

"For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years."

"However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions — of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots — and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets — who went into a frenzy while prophesying — many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour — if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic — perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches."

"What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps."

"When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous."

"We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties."

"As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific explanations for it available at the time. A lot of what was believed and said on the subject appears like sheer lunacy to us now. But we shouldn't be too arrogant — how many of our own theories will look silly when those who follow us have come up with something better? But whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? When "mad," at least in literature, you aren't yourself; you take on another self, a self that is either not you at all, or a truer, more elemental one than the person you're used to seeing in the mirror. You're in danger of becoming, in Shakespeare's works, a mere picture or beast, and in Susanna Moodie's words, a mere machine; or else you may become an inspired prophet, a truth-sayer, a shaman, one who oversteps the boundaries of the ordinarily visible and audible, and also, and especially, the ordinarily sayable. Portraying this process is deep power for the artist, partly because it's a little too close to the process of artistic creation itself, and partly because the prospect of losing our self and being taken over by another, unfamiliar self is one of our deepest human fears."

"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens."

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."

"Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones."

"Nature is to zoos as God is to churches."

"He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo."

"After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is."

"“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”"

"“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”"

"“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”"

"“He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.”"

"“I am not my childhood," Snowman says out loud."

"“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.""

"Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable. We are using up the Earth. It is almost gone."

"“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”"

"You can forget who you are if you're alone too much."

"“we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”"

"I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it."

"How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it."

"“We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.”"

"Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance."

"As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere."

"“I'm fine," said Pilar, "for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.”"

"You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them."

"“It's better to hope than mope!”"

"time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float."

"Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar."

"There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. … I don’t believe in a perfect world. I don’t believe it’s achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene."

"The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly."

"After I wrote Handmaid’s Tale, people came up to me and asked why weren’t there any protests. And I said, “You don’t understand totalitarianism.” A real totalitarianism doesn’t fool around with protests in the streets."

"A lot of people facing fascism didn’t become fascists. I don’t happen to believe that we are all monsters."

"There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too."

"“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”"

"“But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more.”"

"Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood."

"Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic."

"“Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby."

"My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system."

"Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we're back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists."

"Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period …"

"… Anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous."

"The thing I like most about Margaret Atwood the writer is that she's fearless. Fearlessness... that is revolutionary."

"she has this future that is totally non-technological; it gets harder and harder to see how we would get to a non-technological future without a terrible war or something, simply because people find technology so convenient. So it isn't likely that they would just give it up. It was an interesting book."

"My writing ambition was sharpened by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, an unapologetically political novel that reminds us of what it costs to be a woman in this world or the next."

"Margaret Atwood has written: "You tell the story you have to tell; let others tell the story that they have to tell.""

"Margaret Atwood is an extraordinarily good writer who has produced widely different books: so far, two novels, five books of poetry, and a critical guide to Canadian literature. She possesses an unusual combination of wit and satiric edge, a fine critical intelligence, and an ability to go deep into the irrational earth of the psyche. Her books are varied in genre yet through everyone of them run victor/victim and quest for self-themes, a set of symbols, and a developing underlay of theory. Some themes she shares with other Canadians, and others are characteristic of our developing women's culture. All are vital and juicy...Atwood is a large and remarkable writer. Her concerns are nowhere petty. Her novels and poems move and engage me deeply, can matter to people who read them. As she has come to identify herself consciously, cannily, looking all ways in that tradition she has defined as literature of a victimized colony, I hope that she will also come to help consciously define another growing body to which her work in many of its themes belongs: a women's culture. With her concern with living by eating, with that quest for the self that Barbara Demming has found at the heart of major works by women from the last 150 years with her passion for becoming conscious of one's victimization and ceasing to acquiesce, with her insistence on nature as a living whole of which we are all interdependent parts, with her"

"Surfacing is not a programmatic novel. It is the work of a poet, filled with animistic and super-natural materials."

"Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware”, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind."

"These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for admonishing them that a person who wants to think seriously about the mind-body problem has to pay attention to the brain. But this acknowledgment is not always extended to Pat herself, or to the work she does now. “Although some of Churchland’s views have taken root in mainstream philosophy, she is not part of it,” Ned Block, a philosopher at New York University, wrote in a review of one of her books. “Unfortunately, Churchland . . . approaches many conceptual issues in the sciences of the mind like the more antiphilosophical of scientists.” Although she tried to ignore it, Pat was wounded by this review. But it was true; in some ways she had simply left the field. Although she often talks to scientists, she says she hasn’t got around to giving a paper to a philosophy department in five years. These days, she often feels that the philosophical debate over consciousness is more or less a waste of time."

"Neither Pat nor Paul feels much nostalgia for the old words, or the words that will soon be old. They appreciate language as an extraordinary tool, probably the most extraordinary tool ever developed. But in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, in which humans are just one animal among many, and not always the most successful one, language looks like quite a minor phenomenon, they feel. Animals don’t have language, but they are conscious of their surroundings and, sometimes, of themselves. Pat and Paul emphatically reject the idea that language and thought are, deeply, one: that the language we now use reflects thought’s innate structure; that thought can take only the form in which we humans now know it; that there could be no thought without language. Moreover, the new is the new! It is so exciting to think about revolutions in science leading to revolutions in thought, and even in what seems, to the uninitiated, to be “raw feeling,” that, by comparison, old words and old sentiments seem dull indeed."

"Fifty percent of people want to sleep with me, and the other 50 percent want to kill me."

"Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serves up a triple scoop of crazy, sprinkled with crazy, and topped off with warm crazy sauce."

"For Dick Cheney, it must have felt just like any other day at the office: Folks who don't shave, don't bathe, and want him dead. Wow, feels just like back home!"

"Al Gore could really pollute a bathroom … Just look at the guy. If someone doesn't take away his pork 'n' beans, he's bound to get another one of those 'gut feelings' and mistake his own greenhouse gas production for science!"

"The Second Amendment was meant to give citizens the right to bear arms against the government, back when Uncle Sam's toys were as lame as yours… Handguns are sheer lunacy"

"Well I think we do have to define torture. One man’s torture is another man’s CIA’s sponsored swim lesson."

"I don't really pay much attention to it anymore. It's pretty ridiculous. I view it as a giant graffiti board for people with axes to grind — or for guys named Jimbo Wales who want to dump their girlfriends."

"While the Democratic-led congress hits a record low nine percent approval rating despite high pre-election hopes, the even further left-leaning embodiment of that epic failure is now shuffling around the globe, sending crowds into frenzies through speeches pimped out with eminently forgettable rhetoric that would make great political speechmakers like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill scratch their heads."

"Never has outright racism been so exciting or so chic — both here in America and abroad! Kumbaya! In fact, a German paper called him “the black JFK”, which is an insult to the late President Kennedy, who -- again, leaving aside the blatant racism here — was nowhere near as far left as Obama."

"Sarkozy was elected last year by insisting on immigrants speaking French and insisting that they integrate into the French culture...Obama’s call for Americans to learn Spanish to accommodate the onslaught of Mexican immigrants makes the French government sound like Rush Limbaugh."

"She has very passionate opinions...she's articulate, intelligent, and we get a lot of favorable mail about her."

"Oh god, she is feminism's worst nightmare."

"I think they just thought she would be a good kind of lightning rod. We did one or two rehearsals, and I know for a fact that people liked her legs."

""You think you're so smart" is never a compliment; the only thing worse than being smart is thinking that you are."

"Nerds do not think they are better than you. Nerds are better than you, in their particular fields, unless you happen to be an even more devoted nerd."

"Anyone taking classics or history for the prestige is either at Oxford or stuck in 1909."

"Why clog your head with tedious facts about the past when you can simply demand an exam review sheet or consult Google or Wikipedia?"

"When we valorize ignorance and debase reason, we diminish man and the humanity that dwells within him, to bum an old fashioned phrase from Kant."

"We are not the adults in the sense that Kant intended, but adolescents. This is a problem, because we are the world's most heavily armed teenagers."

"All we really need to do is learn 'em so they don't frig up the cash register or offend the customers."

"Who teh heLL R u 2 tELL me what 2 reed or how 2 spel?"

"If there is no more market for ancient Greek, there should be no more ancient Greek. If there are no jobs for historians, there should be no history. If there is no money in brains, there should be no brains - except for the brains that make money."

"The panic over public health care is funny and sad, since America has had death panels and sinister bureaucrats for years. They're called Aetna, Humana, and Wellpoint, they make a killing, figuratively and literally."

"Bankers grovelled before the governments they usually revile, like wispy poets whining for grant money. They got billions in bailouts, yet somehow the financial sector still inspires more trust and respect than the government that saved it from itself."

"It's a shame that pantyless party girls get more attention than the real heroes, the nurses and teachers and moms."

"Laughing at the clueless mouthfarts of cute twenty somethings who spent their high-school years with vocal coaches or plastic surgeons is another variation on the theme "Are we getting dumber?""

"Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique egg heads torture the young from the grave, but it just doesn't pay the bills."

"I can sculpt a birthday cake out of shit and insist that I obviously mean cake, that my real intent is to wish you a happy birthday, but my intentions and protestations cannot turn crap into a delicious dessert."

"The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb."

"Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything."

"If history is the judge to which we appeal, then it can also find against us. It can highlight our mistakes by reminding us of those who, at other times, faced similar problems but who made different, perhaps better decisions."

"As a judge, history also undermines the claims of leaders to omniscience. Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past. Robespierre in revolutionary France and Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot's Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society. The founder of China, the Qin Emperor, reportedly destroyed all the earlier histories, buried the scholars who might remember them, and wrote his own history. Successive dynasties were not as brutal but they, too, wrote their own histories of China's past. Mao went one better: He tried to destroy all memories and all artifacts that, by reminding the Chinese people of the past, might prevent him from remodelling them into the new Communist men and women."

"Histories that that show past injustices or crimes can be used to argue for redress in the present."

"Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present."

"Nationalism brought Germany and Italy into being, destroyed Austrio-Hungary, and , more recently, broke apart Yugoslavia. People have suffered and died, and have harmed and killed others, for their 'nation'."

"We have to be careful to cast our gaze as widely as possible. If we only look for the lessons that reinforce decisions we have already made, we will run into trouble."

"History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process."

"People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish. And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong."

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."

"A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."

"This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. This is what happens. Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."

"Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places."

"She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood: that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements."

"“,” is a true story about . Reading her life and dramatizing it, I could find all these things . . . some have changed, and some haven’t that much. Oh, I love that story – I love her. I love her femininity, her weaknesses as well as her strengths. The way she falls desperately in love with and she just can’t give him up. But what does he hold against her? Her achievements"

"'The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.'"

"Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again."

"I want my stories to move people, I don’t care if they are men or women or children. I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn’t that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish."

"Alice Munro's Open Secrets is so liberating and exciting for any new story writer to feel her open textures, her bold reach, her plainness, with no showing off, no special effects. She reminds us that there's no formula for a story, it can be as loosely woven as you like, as long as the inner logic works organically. Easier said of course, much easier said, than done."

"In 1976, I went to visit my mother, Alice Munro, for the summer at her home in Clinton, Ont. One night, while she was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. I was nine years old."

"[Some time later, after his actions became known] Meanwhile, Fremlin acted quickly. He told my mother he would kill me if I ever went to the police, and wrote letters to my family, blaming me for the abuse."

"In spite of the letters and threats, my mother went back to Fremlin, and stayed with him until he died in 2013. She said that she had been "told too late," she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her."

"As a critic both of the Israeli occupation and of corporate-dictated globalization, it seems to me that the convergence that took place in Washington last weekend was long overdue. Despite easy labels like "anti-globalization," the trade-related protests of the past three years have all been about self-determination: the right of people everywhere to decide how best to organize their societies and economies, whether that means introducing land reform in Brazil, or producing generic AIDS drugs in India, or, indeed, resisting an occupying force in Palestine."

"The globalization movement isn’t anti-Semitic, it just hasn’t fully confronted the implications of diving into the Middle East conflict. Most people on the left are simply choosing sides and in the Middle East, where one side is under occupation and the other has the U.S. military behind it, the choice seems clear. But it is possible to criticize Israel while forcefully condemning the rise of anti-Semitism. And it is equally possible to be pro-Palestinian independence without adopting a simplistic "pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel" dichotomy, a mirror image of the good-versus-evil equations so beloved by President George W. Bush."

"Nothing is going to erase anti-Semitism, but Jews outside and inside Israel might be a little safer if there was a campaign to distinguish between diverse Jewish positions and the actions of the Israeli state. This is where an international movement can play a crucial role. Already, alliances are being made between globalization activists and Israeli "refuseniks," soldiers who refuse to serve their mandatory duty in the occupied territories. And the most powerful images from Saturday’s protests were rabbis walking alongside Palestinians. But more needs to be done. It’s easy for social justice activists to tell themselves that since Jews already have such powerful defenders in Washington and Jerusalem, anti-Semitism is one battle they don’t need to fight. This is a deadly error. It is precisely because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Mr. Sharon that the fight against it must be reclaimed. When anti-Semitism is no longer treated as Jewish business, to be taken care of by Israel and the Zionist lobby, Mr. Sharon is robbed of his most effective weapon in the indefensible and increasingly brutal occupation. And as an extra bonus, whenever hatred of Jews diminishes, the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen shrink right down with it."

"Whatever happens, it's time to bury neoliberalism. We need genuine wealth + power redistribution. Only a real left can fight fascism."

"If you're not arguing, your coalition isn't wide enough."

"movements, unlike capital, tend to move slowly. This is particularly true of movements that exist to deepen democracy and allow ordinary people to define their goals and grab the reins of history."

"If the world’s largest economy looked poised to show that kind of visionary leadership, other major emitters — like the European Union, China, and India — would almost certainly find themselves under intense pressure from their own populations to follow suit."

"Decades from now, if we are exquisitely lucky enough to tell a thrilling story about how humanity came together in the nick of time to intercept the metaphorical meteor, the pivotal chapter will not be the highly produced cinematic moment when Barack Obama won the Democratic primary and told an adoring throng of supporters that this would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” No, it will be the far less scripted and markedly more scrappy moment when a group of fed-up young people from the Sunrise Movement occupied the offices of Pelosi after the midterm elections, calling on her to get behind the plan for a Green New Deal — with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropping by the sit-in to cheer them on."

"What will sustain us in the difficult years to come is a dream of the future that is not just better than ecological collapse, but a whole lot better than the barbaric ways our system treats human and nonhuman life right now."

"Those could be the famous last words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy."

"There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repair — to repair our relationship with the earth and with one another, to heal the deep wounds dating back to the founding of the country. Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mindset — a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview, a transformation from “gig and dig” to an ethos of care and repair...The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets. But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for."

"As Greta has told us so often: “Our house is on fire.” And I firmly believe that there are three things that have to align if we are going to douse the flames. First, we need the courage to dream of a different kind of future. To shake off the sense of inevitable apocalypse that has pervaded our culture. To give us a destination, a common goal, a picture of the world we are working towards.Greta Thunberg is one of the great truth-tellers of this or any time."

"And now this movement is gearing up for its biggest challenge yet: They have called on people of all ages to join the and go on strike, all around the world, on September 20. Because protecting the future is not a spectator sport."

"Thunberg and the many other amazing young organizers have been very clear that they do not want adults to pat them on the head and thank them for the hope infusion. They want us to join them and fight for the future alongside them. Because it is their right. And all of our duty."

"We have to get out of this “my crisis is bigger than your crisis: first we save the planet and then we fight poverty and racism, and violence against women”. That doesn’t work. That alienates the people who would fight hardest for change. This debate has shifted a huge amount in the US because of the leadership of the climate justice movement and because it is congresswomen of colour who are championing the Green New Deal."

"Not a day goes by that I don’t have a moment of sheer panic, raw terror, complete conviction that we are doomed, and then I do pull myself out of it. I’m renewed by this new generation that is so determined, so forceful. I’m inspired by the willingness to engage in electoral politics, because my generation, when we were in our 20s and 30s, there was so much suspicion around getting our hands dirty with electoral politics that we lost a lot of opportunities. What gives me the most hope right now is that we’ve finally got the vision for what we want instead, or at least the first rough draft of it. This is the first time this has happened in my lifetime."

"Look, we know this script. In 2008, the last time we had a global financial meltdown, the same kinds of bad ideas for no-strings-attached corporate bailouts carried the day, and regular people around the world paid the price... We know what Trump's plan is: a pandemic shock doctrine featuring all the most dangerous ideas lying around, from privatizing Social Security to locking down borders to caging even more migrants. Hell, he might even try canceling elections. But the end of this story hasn't been written yet."

"Instead of rescuing the dirty industries of the last century, we should be boosting the clean ones that will lead us into safety in the coming century (Green New Deal)."

"If there is one thing history teaches us, it's that moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve."

"In times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible...But whose ideas? Sensible, fair ones, designed to keep as many people as possible safe, secure, and healthy? Or predatory ideas, designed to further enrich the already unimaginably wealthy while leaving the most vulnerable further exposed?"

"There have been times in my reporting from disaster zones when I have had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing not just a crisis in the here and now, but getting a glimpse of the future – a preview of where the road we are all on is headed, unless we somehow grab the wheel and swerve... One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive... I started to notice the same tactics in disaster zones around the world. I used the term “shock doctrine” to describe the brutal tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy”."

"Texas is about as far from a Green New Deal as you can possibly get, seeing as a Green New Deal is a plan to bring together the need to get off fossil fuels in the next decade to radically decarbonize our energy system,.. to marry that huge infrastructure investment in the next green economy with a plan to battle poverty, to create huge numbers of good, union, green jobs, to take care of people. It’s a plan to have universal public healthcare and child care and a jobs guarantee. So it’s all the things that are not happening in Texas, because there isn’t just this extreme weather, which many scientists believe is linked to our warming planet — you know, you can’t link one storm with climate change, but the patterns are very clear, and this should be a wake-up call — but Texas is also suffering a pandemic of poverty, of exclusion, of racial injustice... we’ve heard this messaging, I think, because of panic, frankly, because the Green New Deal is a plan that could solve so many of Texas’s problems and the problems across the country, and Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer except for more deregulation, more privatization, more austerity. And so they have been frantically seeking to deflect from the real causes of this crisis, which is an intersection of extreme weather, of the kind that we are seeing more of because of climate change, intersecting with a deregulated, fossil fuel-based energy system."

"We should think about Ted Cruz’s ill-fated trip to Mexico not as a, quote-unquote, “mistake,” as he now describes it, but, in a way, as a metaphor, Amy, a metaphor for how these politicians actually think about the climate crisis. They don’t think it’s a hoax. They just say that publicly. They know it is real. You know, these are people with deep ties to the oil and gas industry, and the oil and gas industry is, in lots of ways, benefiting from the climate crisis, because there’s melting in the Arctic. It’s opening up trade routes because of that. They’re having to adapt all kinds of their own infrastructure to deal with the reality of climate change. They don’t really genuinely believe that it isn’t real. They’re on the frontlines of it in lots of ways. What they believe — and I think we’ve talked about this before on the show — is that this is somebody else’s problem. They believe that their wealth, their power and their privilege will protect them from the worst of its effects. And if we want to know what that looks like, it looks like Ted Cruz boarding a flight to Mexico in the middle of a disaster to go to the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún."

"What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom."

"When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?"

"The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I'm told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an Anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition."

"So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid."

"With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past."

"In many ways, schools and universities remain our culture's most tangible embodiment of public space and collective responsibility. University campuses in particular —with their residences, libraries, green spaces and common standards for open and respectful discourse - play a crucial, if now largely symbolic, role: they are the one place left where young people can see a genuine public life being lived. And however imperfectly we may have protected these institutions in the past, at this point in our history the argument against transforming education into a brand-extension exercise is much the same as the one for national parks and nature reserves: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space is still possible."

"While brands slowly transform the experience of campus life for undergraduates, another kind of takeover is under way at the institutional research level. All over the world, university campuses are offering their research facilities, and priceless academic credibility, for the brands to use as they please."

"As we look back, it seems like willful blindness. The abandonment of the radical economic foundation of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully retrained generation of activists in the politics of image, not action."

"Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school."

"Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth."

"Rather than calling attention to the house of mirrors, that passes for empirical truth (as postmodern acadimics did), and rather than fighting for better mirrors (as the ID warriors did), today's media activists are concentrating on shattering the impenetrable shiny surfaces of branded culture, picking up the pieces and using them as sharp weapons in a war of actions, not ideas."

"When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question."

"Job creation as part of the corporate mission, particularly the creation of fll time, decently paid, stable jobs, appears to have taken a back seat in many major corporations, regardless of company profits"

"Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular."

"Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you."

"Too often, however, the expansive nature of the branding process ends up causing the event to be usurped, creating the quintessential lose-lose situation. Not only do fans begin to feel a sense of alienation from (if not outright resentment toward) once-cherished cultural events, but the sponsors lose what they need most: a feeling of authenticity with which to associate their brands."

"Since many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images."

"Just when Americans most need information about the outside world - and their country's complicated and troubling place in it - they are only getting themselves reflected back, over and over and over: Americans weeping, Americans recovering, Americans cheering, Americans praying. A media house of mirrors, when what we all need are more windows on the world.”"

"Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands."

"The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the role of expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically— prices will not keep rising, nor will wages. (p82)"

"The coups, wars and slaughters to instill and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excess of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts in the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained- almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism. (p20)"

"The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections. (p125)"

"As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective. (p126)"

"It was this wave of reforms that turned China into the sweatshop of the world, the preferred location for contract factories for virtually every multinational on the planet. No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals. (p190)"

"During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drinks more than twice as much alcohol as they used to - and they are reaching for harder painkillers as well. (p238)"

"...This is what Keynes had meant when he warned of the dangers of economic chaos—you never know what combination of rage, racism and revolution will be unleashed. (p264)"

"As for journalists and activists, we seemed to be exhausting our attention on the spectacular physical attacks, forgetting that the parties with the most to gain never show up on the battlefield. (p326)"

"...extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. In a way, it had happened already to the antiwar movement."

"By the time the think-tank lifers arrived in Baghdad, the crucial roles in the reconstruction had already been outsourced to Halliburton and KPMG. Their job as the public servants was simply to administer the petty cash, which in Iraq took the form of handling shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills to contractors. It was a graphic glimpse into the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for which ideological commitment is far more relevant than elaborate field experience. (p355)"

"Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth. (p359)"

"Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own. (p392)"

"When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty. (p409)"

"The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. (p415)"

"The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them. (p426)"

"The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. (p450)"

"It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of diehard Stalinists at the height of the purges as of libertarian climate deniers today. p. 37"

"We started treating the atmosphere as a waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that. p. 159"

"The solution to global warming is not to fix the world, but to fix ourselves. p. 279"

"The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity. p. 7"

"And there are plenty of signs that climate change will be no exception [to The Shock Doctrine]—that, rather than sparking solutions that have a real chance of preventing catastrophic warming and protecting us from inevitable disasters, the crisis will once again be seized upon to hand over yet more resources to the 1 percent. p. 8"

"… opposition movements … will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals. p. 10"

"...we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. p. 18"

"It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. p. 18"

"Challenge the extreme ideology... blocking so much sensible action... to show how unfettered corporate power [poses] a grave threat to the habitability of the planet. p.20"

"… our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on Earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature. p. 21"

"We need a shift in political "power—specifically … a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power. p. 25"

"There are all kinds of measures that would lower emissions substantively that could and should be done right now. p. 25"

"So this book proposes a different strategy: think big, go deep, and move the ideological pole far away from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become the greatest enemy to planetary health. If we can shift the cultural context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible reformist policies that will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction. p. 26"

"Maybe within a few years, some of the ideas highlighted in these pages that sound impossibly radical today—like a basic income for all, or a rewriting of trade law, or real recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from polluting extraction—will start to seem reasonable, even essential. p. 26"

"… the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away." p. 28"

"… global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that ‘earth-human systems’ are becoming dangerously unstable in response. p. 450"

"… only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. p. 450"

"… if climate justice carries the day, the economic costs to our elites will be real—not only because of the carbon left in the ground but also because of the regulations, taxes, and social programs needed to make the required transformation. Indeed, these new demands on the ultra rich could effectively bring the era of the footloose Davos oligarch to a close. p. 457"

"[Climate justice economic demands] represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. … Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth. p. 458"

"[Activism] becomes an entirely normal activity throughout society …. During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing ‘activists’ and ‘regular people’ became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone. p. 459"

"We are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage, while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are capable of solving problems big and small. p. 460"

"how do you change a worldview, an unquestioned ideology? Part of it involves choosing the right early policy battles—game-changing ones that don’t merely aim to change laws but change patterns of thought. That means that a fight for a minimal carbon tax might do a lot less good than, for instance, forming a grand coalition to demand a guaranteed minimum income. That’s not only because a minimum income, as discussed, makes it possible for workers to say no to dirty energy jobs but also because the very process of arguing for a universal social safety net opens up a space for a fullthroated debate about values—about what we owe to one another based on our shared humanity, and what it is that we collectively value more than economic growth and corporate profits. p. 461"

"Indeed a great deal of the work of deep social change involves having debates during which new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics. p. 461"

"Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. p. 462"

"In the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism. p. 462"

"The transformative movements of the past"modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible. They were also unafraid of the language of morality—to give the pragmatic, cost-benefit arguments a rest and speak of right and wrong, of love and indignation. p. 462"

"Abolitionists used "highly polarizing rhetoric" to emphasize their moral arguments. Climate activists need to take a similarly clear moral stance. p. 463"

"… there are plenty of solid economic arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels … But we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous… p. 464"

"… there is little doubt that another crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again, taking us all by surprise. The real question is what progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and confidence with which it will be seized. p. 466"

"Because our house is on fire, and this should come as no surprise. Built on false promises, discounted futures, and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start. It's too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let's put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care. Let's forge a Global Green New Deal-for everyone this time. (from the Introduction)"

"Suddenly we are no longer prisoners of the never-ending present in our social media feeds. We are part of a long and complex collective story, one in which human beings are not one set of attributes, fixed and unchanging, but rather, a work in progress, capable of deep change. By looking decades backward and forward simultaneously, we are no longer alone as we confront our weighty historical moment. We are surrounded both by ancestors whispering that we can do what our moment demands just as they did, and by future generations shouting that they deserve nothing less. (from "The Art of the Green New Deal")"

"The main reason that the elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal was that its programs were helping people. But another reason had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era's transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins famously put it, "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people." ("The Art of the Green New Deal")"

"yes, we need to grow faster and do more. But the weight of the world is not on any one person's shoulders: Not yours. Not Zoe's. Not mine. It rests in the strength of the project of transformation that millions are already a part of. That means we are free to do the kind of work that will sustain us, so that we can all stay in this movement for the long run. Because that's what it will take."

"It's not that one sphere is more important than the other. It's that we have to do both: the local and the global. The resistance and the alternatives. The "nos" to what we cannot survive and the "yeses" that we need to thrive."

"the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement."

"We don't have the right to demand perfection from each other. But we do have the right to expect progress. To demand evolution. So, let's make some new mistakes."

"It Will Be a Massive Job Creator"

"Paying for It Will Create a Fairer Economy"

"It Taps the Power of Emergency"

"It's Procrastination-proof"

"It's Recession-proof"

"It's a Backlash Buster"

"It Can Raise an Army of Supporters"

"It Will Build New Alliances-and Undercut the Right"

"We Were Born for This Moment"

"That bleak view of humanity--that we are nothing more than a collection of atomized individuals and nuclear families, unable to do anything of value together except wage war-has had a stranglehold over the public imagination for a very long time. No wonder so many of us believed we could never rise to the climate challenge. But more than thirty years later, as surely as the glaciers are melting and the ice sheets are breaking apart, that "free-market" ideology is dissolving, too. In its place, a new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. It's a vision that says that all of us, combined, make up the fabric of society. And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve."

"Here is my attempt to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, with its maze of simulated selves and digital avatars and mass surveillance and racial and ethnic projections and fascist doubles and the studiously denied shadows that are all coming to the surface at once. It's going to take some wild turns-but rest assured that the point of this mapping is not to stay trapped inside the house of mirrors, but to do what I sense many of us long to do: escape its mind-bending confines and find our way toward some kind of collective power and purpose. The point is to make our way out of this collective vertigo, and get somewhere distinctly better, together. (from the Introduction)"

"Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds. The known world is crumbling. That's okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks. (chapter 15, p342)"

"If there is anything this journey has taught that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf's. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It's all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling-between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves-is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It's about what we make together. (from the Epilogue)"

"A critically important thought-leader in these perilous times, a necessary voice as a courageous movement of movements rises from the ashes."

"The greatest theorist of climate change."

"that’s something that Naomi Klein talks about a lot, is how we are sort of in this moment where imagination is one of the most valuable things we can bring to the table. And a failure of imagination means a failure of the spectrum of futures that are available to us. And I just, I like to think of — so I remind myself and others that there is still such a wide spectrum of possible futures, and we do get some choice in which ones we have."

"Journalist Naomi Klein notes, "every time I log on to activist news sites like Indymedia.org, which practice 'open publishing,' I'm confronted with a string of Jewish conspiracy theories about 9/11 and excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the tired old forgery from tsarist Russia that purported to represent the Zionist plot to take over the world."

"At the conference itself [Copenhagen 2009], she became an important voice for the NGOs shut out of the negotiating sessions, and made a convincing case that there was little chance of solving global warming in isolation from the other problems of power and poverty plaguing the globe."

"In a conclusion that the creators of South Park must have forced on her, Klein finds that the most authentic answers to our current troubles lie in the wisdom of Sioux tribes. The leftist trope of the "noble savage" whose Edenic insights must shame the civilisation that has usurped them stretches back at least as far as Rousseau. Yet many of these insights are to philosophy what panpipes are to music. Klein quotes LaDonna Brave Bull Allard who laughingly says that the grandkids "can't believe how little some of the white people know. They come running: 'Grandma! The white people don't know how to chop wood! Can we teach them?' I say, 'Yes, teach them.'" If you dream that the future of humanity might constitute more than wood-chopping, then you're probably a racist and Klein has little time and littler consolation for you. On another occasion an evidently awestruck Klein relays some native Sioux wisdom, viz: "There are things that are more important than money." Who knew? The aperçus of Klein's school of thought would be shamed by the school of Hallmark Cards."

"I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today."

"We attend the first Hawai'i screening of Naomi Klein's documentary at the mall movie theatre. The line for the documentary is long, almost as long as the Hawai'i endangered species list. Unlike the endangered species list, there aren't many natives in this line...When the natives in "This Changes Everything" cry, the white people in the theatre cry "white tears" extra-loudly. I hate it when white people cry extra-loudly, as if they've never seen native people cry in real life. When the documentary shows polluted native lands, the white people gasp extra-loudly. I hate it when white people gasp extra-loudly. "Stop gasping so loudly!" I shout in my head. "Everything already changed for native peoples centuries ago!" We sneak out of the theatre during the post-documentary discussion. I whisper to my wife: "The Geological Society should refer to this era of human destruction as the Wypipocene." She says we should make a documentary about how climate change is finally making white people uncomfortable. Titled: "Melting Glaciers, White Tears.""

"Naomi Klein's work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations."

"Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous…"

"I annoy everybody, not just certain women…I think it is because I'm not interested in the group, only in the individual. What happens is my message enters the conflicted person reading it who is half self, half society but does not know where one begins and the other ends. I light up that conflict and it makes people angry."

"A journalist recently told me that she had been sent to find out who I was. [...] There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it."

"I worry I don't see things the way everyone else does."

"I can't even remember Saving Agnes. I haven't read it in years and years. I don’t think I could read it. It's a strange thing about having been publishing for so long. As with any memory of yourself at twenty-five, it feels like your cellular being has completely changed. It's not just photographs of me with a weird hairstyle at twenty-five—a novel is such an intricate document."

"I could almost divide my life on either side of this line, between the things that are real and the things that are imitating reality and are synthetic or inauthentic, and the awful pain of being in the synthetic life or the synthetic relationship, the one that is a bit like the thing you want but is not it. So that was that book."

"Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband [[w:Adrian Clarke (photographer)|Adrian] Clarke]], whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids. She pours scorn on his "dependence" and "unwaged domesticity", but won't do chores herself because they make her feel, of all things, "unsexed". She is horrified when he demands half of every­thing in the divorce: "They’re my children," she snarls. "They belong to me.""

"If it's a good project and I feel I have something to add, it's really rewarding."

"Alberta and some of the other provinces, Nova Scotia, in particular, have an at-home type of kit that we don’t have in B.C., a kit that is more amenable to distributing to people, the BTNX kits"

"The scientific facts are one thing; the social choices and consequences are another. We need to consider both"

"I know that is one of the things that builds resilience in us as a community, and that gets us through these times of trauma"

"The psychology of what we’re dealing with leads some people to react that way, and I do believe that it is our collective support for each other that helps mitigate the impacts of these things"

"To be a public face for this long takes its toll, but I’m also I’m very grateful. I have an incredible team of people that I work with … I am so proud and grateful to be the face and the voice of a really strong public health team here"

"I’ve come to recognize that change is very upsetting for some people and it triggers that feeling that we don’t know anything and that we’re making mistakes, whereas it really is learning as we go about the virus"

"So all of that stuff is normal. It’s how we learn. I think most important is not being rigid and sticking to something when we’re learning more of what we need to do. So change is inevitable"

"Most research on opposition to wind energy projects focuses on specific case studies or small geographic areas,”"

"“We wanted to take a comprehensive look at political opposition across North America to understand how common opposition is and what predicts it.”"

"Fossil fuel plants are predominantly located in poorer communities and communities of color. When wealthier, whiter communities oppose wind energy projects in their backyards, they extend the lifetime of fossil fuel projects. This is an injustice.”"

"“Fossil fuel plants are predominantly located in poorer communities and communities of color, “These plants create pollution. We need to replace fossil fuel power plants with clean energy, like wind and solar. When wealthier, whiter communities oppose wind energy projects in their backyards, they extend the lifetime of fossil fuel projects. This is an injustice.”"

"I have kids, and I don’t want to cook on gas,"

"For my topic today I have chosen a subject connecting mathematics and aeronautical engineering. The histories of these two subjects are close. It might appear however to the layman that, back in the time of the first powered flight in 1903, aeronautical engineering had little to do with mathematics. The Wright brothers, despite the fact that they had no university education, were well read and learned their art using wind tunnels but it is unlikely that they knew that airfoil theory was connected to the Riemann conformal mapping theorem. But it was also the time of and later who developed and understood that connection and put mathematics solidly behind the new engineering. Since that time each new geernation has discovered new problems that are at the forefront of both fields. One such problem is flight near the speed of sound. This one in fact has puzzled more than one generation."

"The women who earned their Ph.D.'s in mathematics during the forties and fifties include some of the most distinguished mathematicians and mathematics educators of this century. Julia Robinson, Cathleen Morawetz, and Mary Ellen Rudin are probably the best-known women mathematicians of this generation."

"There is no doubt in my mind about which type of vulture I want attendant upon my death. Any funeral industry catalogue will provide you with a long list of the unwelcome vultures. A book on the birds of the west coast will supply you with the one species I would be happy pick over my bones — the . There are few selfless acts toward the natural world available to human beings and the one that would cause us the least inconvenience is illegal — the simple act of being consumed by nature's prime scavengers."

"In these interviews I got a privileged glimpse into his century — and what a century. In mathematical terms, the population-savvy would have noted that 1910 to 2010 represents one of the steepest trajectories in rates of extinction the world has ever experienced, rivaling the . In his lifetime the number of humans had escalated from 1.75 billion to just under 7 billion, consuming proportionally more resources than in the past ten millennia to achieve a rising standard of living but also an obscene inequity. In poetic terms, Cowan the photographer and writer had captured the beauty and diversity of the wildlife and landscapes devoured. The loss of them was profound. What captured my imagination was that he was both early witness to and participant in these changes. He was the last of the naturalist-hunters and the first of the alarmed scientists."

"The in had disappeared by around 1983. They just suddenly stopped. They were just nowhere."

"New religions are like weeds in our garden. Society’s gardeners will attempt to pull out weeds to make room for cultured plants and familiar religions. However, some weeds may be cherished flowers in other lands, and those deemed “invasive” might be edible or have healing properties."

"Media reports on “cults” frequently show bias and hasty, inadequate research methods, and are shaped by a militant secularism that showcases a group’s weirdest beliefs without context or any explanatory framework. Many journalists openly declare their mandate to “unmask” the cults and their proto-criminal leaders. They will seek out apostates and whistleblowers who are dedicated to broadcasting the “bad news” about their former religion."

"I got to see life under the microscope at an early age."

"It was a challenge to find a permanent job in the 1980s"

"[The Biophysical Journal] is one of the few journals with the aim of helping authors to improve their papers, rather than just rejecting most of them."

"AI will not solve poverty, because the conditions that lead to societies that pursue profit over people are not technical. AI will not solve discrimination, because the cultural patterns that say one group of people is better than another because of their gender, their skin color, the way they speak, their height, or their wealth are not technical. AI will not solve climate change, because the political and economic choices that exploit the earth’s resources are not technical matters. As tempting as it may be, we cannot use AI to sidestep the hard work of organizing society so that where you are born, the resources of your community, and the labels placed upon you are not the primary determinants of your destiny. We cannot use AI to sidestep conversations about patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, or who holds power and who doesn’t."

"Defaults are not neutral. They often reflect the coded gaze—the preferences of those who have the power to choose what subjects to focus on"

"If you have a face, you have a place in the conversation about AI."

"How will people build professional callouses if the early work that may be viewed as mundane essentials are taken over by AI systems?"