Bilge > Recent Status Updates

…the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he'd allowed that and had not asked about her baby - the one thing she had asked him to do - and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he'd gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass.

Lydia was entirely right. There were four men on that shuttle. But every American woman was. Joan and Vanessa and Donna and Lydia-and so many people at NASA-were steadying themsehves on the edge of a coin. It could be so easy for it all to go sideways. If it did, the backlash would be swift, and brutal. A wave overtaking all of them, each lost in the riptide.

I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time-when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after…
…It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws.

…Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren't. Being willing to make a mistake you got further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have.

Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

… actually you really have to … make yourself known and ask for it bluntly—and repeatedly—at times. That was a very difficult lesson and I think I’m still learning that lesson, but it does work. I think it’s like [political] message work…. You have to tell people [what you want] three times for them to hear it.

Whenever a man asks for and receives some significant reward or opportunity, a really good manager will consider doing the same for his or her female employees with the same qualifications.

If adults are guiding girls toward more structured activities, they’re actually training them to follow externally imposed rules, let others control their circumstances, and assert themselves less. They’re teaching them to accept the status quo and go along with it, rather than question it.

the teacher asked her students to think about how their lives would be different if they’d been born the opposite gender.
Items on the boys’ list included: “I’d have to help my mom cook”; “I’d have to stand around at recess instead of getting to play basketball”…
Examples from the girls’ list included: “I could stay out later”; “I’d get to play more sports”

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasim nor does it arise from sentiments of which non-artists are devoid; it merely contributes to enthusiasm, and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

But there may be a more profound pleasure: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new, but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland could provide.
…

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places.

Secrets make for poor leverage. They die with the people who keep them.