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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

    Way before puberty, before the journal, before the formulation of my life's mission, when I must have been eight or younger, I had a rule: "Think in complete sentences." No giving way to inner screams or sobs-just keep stringing out words in grammatical order. This was a way to keep from going under
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  2. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    But mining is also an intellectual exercise, requiring the combined skills of a plumber, a carpenter, and an electrician as well as an explosives expert. You had to be able to judge the load strength of a beam or the friability of rock at a glance and do instant calculations in your head, because one false step or misplaced stick of dynamite could blow you into body parts or at least send a few digits flying off on their own. 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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  3. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, 'What difference does it make?' Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.
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  4. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.
    book-quoteworldphysics

  5. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding, cushioning, embracing, enfolding, and supporting we had needed just to stumble about through our days!
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  6. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.
    book-quotelogicomnipotence

  7. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner-or more sociable-than that?
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  8. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, "Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here?" I wanted them to come pouring out of their houses and cars calling out, "Look at this! Just look at this! Do you see what I see? The strange juice rising in the grass and the trees, the great freely given, unearned beneficence of the sun?" In my fantasy some of them would buttonhole strangers for the first serious conversations of their lives. Others would throw their arms out and their heads back and scream at the sky in alternating terror and ecstasy. Passersby would hug. Tears of recognition and amazement would be shed. It would be the end of loneliness and falsity and the beginning, after all these wasted years, of whatever it is we are supposed to be doing here. And if they didn't want to respond so demonstratively, then all I asked was a wink here and there, a carefully folded note.
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  9. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as "God," the religious seeker must set aside "any idea about God as being good, wise, {or} compassionate.
    book-quotereligionseeking

  10. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    Science "works", of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, was it really a great improvement over mythology? Why do we insist that theories "work", when they might just as well sit around and look pretty?I couldn't help observing that for every advance in science...some perfectly competent goddess or demiurge is put out of work, a hypothesized spirit dies, or a living thing surrenders its autonomy.
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  11. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire "war machine," we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly-to us-applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the "War on Poverty.
    book-quotewarwarrior

  12. Barbara Ehrenreich _ Living with a Wild God: A

    You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of.
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