“Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl. You can’t let anyone else decide things for you. You have to take care of yourself in this world,” she said.

No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.

“Resistance is the secret of joy,” said a banner carried by Reclaim the Streets in the late 1990s, quoting Alice Walker. Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.

Without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, “You can’t stop me: I am above reason now.”