"I want to tell her civilization is a construct, an abstraction dependent on thousands of trivial variables."

"The few boyfriends and lovers I had. [...] wore This is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirts and ate kale. It's hard to fear a man who eats kale."

"I don't know how to think about money when it's not in use, when there's nowhere to spend it and nothing to spend it on."

"What struck me then, and what strikes me now, was the thought of that man once being someone's baby. And just that word, "baby," would make me want to cry. I would imagine a woman in a clean hospital bed, pushing until she couldn't push any longer, sweating and swearing as her child came out into the world, and I would try to trace all the miserable steps that might take that tiny, helpless thing toward the vagabond holding out his hand and asking for a dime, a coffee, a cigarette, anything to get him through the next hour of his miserable life. I'd name those steps: neglect, abuse, ignorance, hunger, each one closing the gap between the baby and the man it would become."

"Choice is such a tricky concept, maybe a little like freedom. Freedom is fine, until you add another word at the end of it all. You're free to do what you want...but. Sure, go ahead...unless. Some inner philosopher of mine asks what happens to choice if we qualify it."

"Women are shamed for this kind of curiosity, cursed for its devastating, world-ruining effects. Much more than men, I think [...]. Where are the Bible stories and myths about men screwing everything up? Why are women always compared to cats, curious and relentless, happily wreaking havoc because they just. Want. To. Know the goddamned answer? Why all this, and never a thought to the fact that more men have torn up the world than women?"