An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

who knows you better than your own brother?

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

We call them feelings because we feel them.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.

It is not the crook in modern business that we fear, but the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

There are perhaps opportunities for greater political cooperation, at least more cooperation than exists now. But there can be no cooperation in the field because every situation is different

There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

What has happened in most of my books is the call to the extraordinary world, the hero's push, or that push has come to him.

And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.

I think I feel a little differently than other people do. For some reason I've never felt grown up.