93 Quotes by Eula Biss

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake

Art unmakes the world made by work.

And as in any feudal system, the people on whom the entire system depended were robbed, as completely as possible, of their power. The students were, for the most part, unable to hold inept teachers accountable, to protest the wasting of their own time, to influence the grounds on which they would be evaluated, to demand anything, really, of substance from the institution.

An apology is also an admission of guilt

And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.

I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.

If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.

The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.

When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me.