After the revolution, my mother told me, things were going to get better. She meant that the workers would own the factories, that the wealth would be evenly distributed, but she meant something else too. That we’d understand that it wasn’t only our fault; that the powerlessness that had dogged us, generation upon working-class generation, wasn’t only because of our failures, but the result of having the weight of a whole system upon us. Someday that weight would be gone. — 60: 846-850
Human knowledge is not … a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire … VLADIMIR LENIN — 97: 1385-1388
Never get good at something you don’t want to do, my mother taught me. It was a lesson she said she learned from my father. — 129: 1848-1849
And when I write it all down will I say that my mother is clearing away the memories that fill up the small rooms where she needs to live, making way for the self, the self that not religion or motherhood, not communes or communists could contain? In that version I am—still—too small to compete with my mother’s beliefs, but big enough to be in the way. Or will I say that my mother is not clearing out boxes but offering me pieces of the postmarked truth, evidence for the stories she knows I need to tell? These are some of the things I think about on the drive home. — 170: 2464-2468