1
A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.Barbara Ehrenreich
2
In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.Barbara Ehrenreich
3
Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?Barbara Ehrenreich
4
You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon, " a "beast, " or a "black dog, " as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.Barbara Ehrenreich
5
That's what "meaning" is–a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.Barbara Ehrenreich
6
Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?Barbara Ehrenreich
7
If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.Barbara Ehrenreich
8
Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.Barbara Ehrenreich
9
The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.Barbara Ehrenreich
10
The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?Barbara Ehrenreich
11
The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?Barbara Ehrenreich
12
My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize.Barbara Ehrenreich
13
The conventional term is "mystical experience, " meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about "mystery" and "transcendence." As far as I was concerned - as a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training - this was the realm of gods and fairies and of no use to the great human project of trying to retain a foothold on the planet for future generations.Barbara Ehrenreich
14
Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.Barbara Ehrenreich
15
The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses.Barbara Ehrenreich
16
In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.Barbara Ehrenreich
17
I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.Barbara Ehrenreich
18
I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.Barbara Ehrenreich