“Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.” 

“More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.” 

“We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176” 

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.” 

“I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way.” 

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.” 

“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.” 

“In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious—whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.”

“In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” 

“That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.” 

“Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.” 

“I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.” 

“It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” 

“As Dr. King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” 

“I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.” 

“You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.” 

“My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.” 

“In truth, we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no—I believe in people—I” 

“Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” 

“I’m not sure we can understand another country if we don’t understand our own.” 

“The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.” 

“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.” 

“There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.” 

“I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” 

“punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group.” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“The simple right to reproductive freedom - to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction - is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.” 

“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.” 

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.” 

“The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look, instead of by our heads and hearts.” 

“If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.” 

“she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough to ask why that is so.” 

“When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.” 

“If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.” 

“Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181” 

“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.” 

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.” 

“After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.” 

“Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.” 

“All movements need a few people who can’t be fired.” 

“Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, “But I just looked an hour ago!” 

“Rhyming in itself is magic.” 

“I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news” 

“Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.”