When Women Were Dragons

What is grief, but love that’s lost its object?

Men, after all, delight in nothing so much as to recast themselves in the center of the story.

The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. It requires an incredible amount of humility to be willing to be wrong nearly all the time. But we have to be willing to be wrong, and proven wrong, in order to increase knowledge overall. It is a thankless, and essential, job. Thank goodness.

Anger is a funny thing. And it does funny things to us if we keep it inside. I encourage you to consider a question: Who benefits, my dear, when you forst yourself to not feel angry?" She tilted her head and looked at me so hard I thought she could see right into my bones. She raised her eyebrows. "Clearly not you.

It's remarkable how quickly a person can get used to an impossible situation. How terror and panic can start to feel familiar, even ordinary.

When power belongs, not to the violent, and not to the wealthy and well-connected, but to the people, a different sort of future begins to present itself.

Who benefits, my dear, when you force yourself to not feel angry?

Embarrassment, as it turns out, is more powerful than information. And shame is the enemy of truth.

There is nothing lewd about biology, research, or basic facts, gentlemen, and you make yourselves fools when you try to classify the quest for understanding as obscene. The only thing more patently obscene than ignorance is willful ignorance. Arrest yourselves.

I was four years old when I first saw a dragon. I was four years old when I first learned to be silent about dragons. Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, and absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.

Even imperfect things can be precious, after all. The choice itself is precious. The smallness and the largeness of an individual life does not change the fundamental honor and value of every manifestation of our personhood.

There are people who have problems with women, and alas, many of them are also women. That is because of something called the patriarchy, which I'm sure they have not discussed in that school you go to, but that doesn't stop it from being an unnecessary and oppressive obstacle, and best disposed of as soon as possible.

There's very little we can control in this life. All we can do is accept whatever comes, learn what we can, and hang onto what we love. And that's it. In the end, the only thing you can hope to control is yourself. In this moment. Which is both a relief and a huge responsibility." P 236

But I am a scientist, sirs, and my allegiance is not to this body, nor even to myself, but only to the truth. Who benefits when knowledge is buried? Who gains when science succumbs to political expediency?

The only way we challenge poor thinking and bad ideas is through the careful examination of the facts and the publication of data.

The sky was so blue it broke my heart and the world smelled of something beginning.

Gratitude is a funny thing. It feels so similar to joy.

While it is true that there is a freedom in forgetting - and this country has made great use of that freedom - there is a tremendous power in remembrance. Indeed, it is memory that teaches us, and reminds us, again and again, who we truly are and who we have always been.

Time, in our experience, is linear, but in truth time is also looped. It is like a piece of yarn, in which each section of the strand twists and winds around every other - a complicated and complex knot, in which one part cannot be viewed out of context from the others. Everything touches everything else. Everything affects everything else. Each loop, each bend, each twist interact with each other. It is all connected, and it is all one. But every once in a while, there are experiences that slice all the other moments apart - stark, singular things that mark the difference between Before and After. These moments are singular, separate from the knot. Separate even from the thread. They can't be tugged at or loosened. They cannot be wound into something lovely or intricate or delicate. They do not interact seamlessly with the fabric of a life. .They are of another substance entirely. Unstuck in time, and out of sync with a life's patterns and processes.

Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.

There are memories that we carry that are not our own.

There is no room for sorrow in a heart full of fire.

Gods are stupid and shortsighted. They’re like children.” She shook her head. “No. They’re worse. They’re like men—no sense of unintended consequences or follow-through.

But I was wrong about a lot of things when it came to her. This is not particularly unusual. I think, perhaps, none of us ever know our mothers, not really. Or at least, not until it's too late.

A good scientist must remain curious, open-minded, humble, and above all, obedient to the data, and to the facts.

When I was a little girl, they told us to keep our eyes on the ground. They told us not to ask about the houses that burned. They told us to forget. And we were good children. We followed the rules. And now I realize, there is a freedom in forgetting. Or at least it is something that feels like freedom. There is a freedom in not asking questions. There is a freedom in being unburdened by unpleasant information. And sometimes, a person has to hang on to whatever freedoms she can get.

Maybe he couldn't bear it. Maybe it hurt too much to watch her slip away. Maybe he wasn't raised to be a strong man. Maybe he loved her too much to lose her. Maybe all those things are true, and every other characterization I have for him that is ... more obvious and less kind ... perhaps those are true as well. And maybe this is the same with all of us - our best selves and our worst selves and our myriad iterations of mediocre selves are all extant simultaneously within a soul containing multitudes.

Some things are hard to talk about, and then the world clams up and pretends like it was nothing. Or they act like it never happened in the first place. But maybe that's a mistake. Just because people won't talk about something, it doesn't mean that it's any less true or important.

Was I the immovable object, or was I the unstoppable force? Perhaps I was both. Perhaps this is what we learn from our mothers.