“The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.” His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble.

Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States.

so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again.

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life.

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so t

This gets to the crux of the Woolf that has been most exemplary for me: she is always celebrating a liberation that is not official, institutional, rational, but a matter of going beyond the familiar, the safe, the known into the broader world.

At times, thinking is an outdoor activity, and a physical one.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to choose—between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.