I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I’ve written, but the next morning I see that it’s crap. Then I start again – make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
I went into science, ending up with a Ph.D. in cell biology, but along the way I found out that experimental science involves many hours and days and nights of laboratory work, which is a lot like washing dishes, only a little more challenging. I was too impatient, and maybe a little too sloppy, for it. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
I didn’t want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn’t love literature, but I couldn’t distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, ‘Why are we here? What is this business? We’re alive for a few short decades and then poof, we’re out of here.’ Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
Our atheism family tradition is traced to a – I don’t know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
I’m not questioning the monotheistic god. I think there’s absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a god. When I say that, I mean I’m – part of that is that the idea that God could be all-powerful and also benevolent is on its face contradictory. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
There’s a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I’m not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I’m talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote
When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting. Barbara Ehrenreich Read Quote