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Book: Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Quotes of Book: Living with a Wild God: A
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  1. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    The organization of lab work was, and still is, entirely feudal. A "lab" was not only a place or a room or series of rooms, it was the fiefdom of a particular scientist. To "go into" a lab as a grad student was to apprentice yourself to this scientist, with the idea that you would, after several years of patient toil, ascend to a similar rank yourself, at which point you would be able to offload the manual labor to people more junior than yourself."
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  2. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    Whenever I am like this, too critical of the ideas of others and too sure of my own I must remind myself there are only two things that I really know-one: that I exist. I could say I live and am a human being but those things are also matters of definition so I can't be sure. Two: That I know nothing except these two things. One might say that this is being silly and extreme but I think it is best to start out with as few as possible things which you hold to be unquestionably true and start from there.
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  3. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    You may think of yourself as a freestanding individual, a unique point of consciousness in the universe, but in many ways you are just subbing for absent family members or departed ancestors.
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  4. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    What do you do when confronted with an inexplicable and alarming situation? Well, you can panic or give in to some other tyrannical emotion, like dread. Or you can escape into a book or a puzzle or, judging from the adults around me, a bottle of gin. But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.
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  5. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    Ah, hell. Even now, insulated by so many intervening years, I could choke on the pity of it. They started out so young and brave, my parents, and ended up such sordid messes. Only one thing saved my father from dying as a slobbering drunk, and that was Alzheimer's disease, alcohol being unavailable in the nursing home he finally expired in. As for my mother, she didn't live long enough to find out that I grew up to have all the things she craved, that the entire package, plus some, would be delivered exactly a generation late-the adventure, the causes, the friends and hot romances. She died, too, before we could settle things between us, on her third suicide attempt.
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  6. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe, and what this meant, when I started on the path of metaphysical questioning, was that there were no ready answers at hand. My religious friends-and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox-were convinced that God had a "plan" for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize.
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  7. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    You can think of it this way: Thought is electrical activity-a bunch of neurons firing up and connecting to each other-but all this mental circuitry has to function in a liquid environment that swarms with hormones and other small molecules whose levels can register in the mind as emotions. When the liquid starts turning into tar-or worse, going into whirlpool mode and threatening total disintegration-the only way out is to strengthen the neuronal scaffolding and try to keep the circuits dry. From "think in complete sentences" the rule evolved into "think." So I would get to the answers by thinking-not by dreaming or imagining and of course not by praying or pleading to imaginary others.
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  8. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    So this was the mental procedure, which even a little girl could learn: First, size up the situation. Make sure you have all the facts, and nothing but the facts-no folklore, no conventional wisdom, no lazy assumptions. Then examine the facts for patterns and connections. Make a prediction. See if it works. And if it doesn't work, start all over again.
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  9. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?
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  10. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.
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  11. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
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  12. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.
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