25 quotes found
“This whole country's stolen.”
“If they were going to kill you, would they knock?”
“There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.”
“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
“Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.”
“It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.”
“Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations ...”
“Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to m...”
“Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons. Each wheel was to be separate yet united. This dream never quite came to be. Planning is for the world's grea...”
“The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.”
“I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.”
“My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.”
“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. ...”
“Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody...”
“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. The...”
“The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.”
“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”
“But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist...”
“It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.”
“I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born.”
“in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.”
