A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens - to be informed and engaged.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.

Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.