335 Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called "primitive" societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.

If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.

Once I stand and watch helplessly while some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because his mother finally tells him to stop.

If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.

She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.

Inadvertently, I had stumbled across what has been called the Harvard law of animal behavior, which is related to Murphy's law: "You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases.

Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects.