Quotessence
Home / Authors / Eula Biss
Eula Biss

Eula Biss Quotes

Fiction writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllBelieveCapitalismMoneyArtCareChildrenCountryHealthHomeHumans

Famous Eula Biss Quotes

“In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”

PlayGirlsToysDollsBarbie78
Book:The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009
Create image

“Some people choose their precarity - evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.”

WorkMoneyCapitalismPrecarityPrecariat
Book:Having and Being Had
Create image

“Consider relationships of dependence,' my sister suggests. 'You don't own your body- that's not what we are, our bodies aren't independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.' She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. 'I don't even know how to talk about this,' she says. 'The point is there's an illusion of independence.”

Health
Book:On Immunity: An Inoculation
Create image

“If we do not yet know exactly what the presence of a vast range of chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breast milk might mean for the future of our children's health, we do at least know that we are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are already polluted. We have more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies- we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.”

Health
Book:On Immunity: An Inoculation
Create image

“I gave my son a lavishly illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for his fourth birthday, and it did not take very long for me to realize that this was a gift for me, not for him. As Alice engaged in repartee with a dodo early in the book, my son became bored. Alice’s bewilderment and disorientation, which I had anticipated might speak to my son’s experience of being a child in an adult’s world, spoke instead to my own experience navigating the world of information. Being lost in Wonderland is what it feels like to learn about an unfamiliar subject, and research is inevitably a rabbit hole. I fell down it, in my investigation of immunization, and fell and fell, finding that it was much deeper than I anticipated. Like Alice, I fell past shelves full of books, more than I could ever read. Like Alice, I arrived at locked doors. “Drink me,” I was commanded by one source. “Eat me,” I was told by another. They had opposite effects - I grew and shrank, I believed and did not believe. I cried and then found myself swimming in my own own tears.”

ResearchAcademiaAlice In WonderlandDown The Rabbit HoleEula BissOn Immunity
Book:On Immunity: An Inoculation
Create image

“That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.”

PeopleBelieveHumansChildrenArtLawMotivationValuesWealthEvidenceCapitalismDoctorsPressureHarmOfficialsInnateResearchersPlausibleRobbing
Author:Eula Biss
Create image

“And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.”

WorldWantHumansMeanUseNaturalPowerfulDesignProductsComfortOffersPureSafeIntelligentMedicineProfoundAlternativesLimitationMost PowerfulAlienationNatural WorldBenignIntelligent DesignSynonymAlternative Medicine
Author:Eula Biss
Create image

“What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to 'pay homage to the transitive' and enjoy 'a becoming in which one never becomes.' Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer.”

ThinkingWayMeanMadeBookRealShowsReadingEnjoyChallengesPayBecomingGenerousInvitesBeing RealOfferingUnpredictableLiberatingWay Of ThinkingHomageNelsonMaggie
Author:Eula Biss
Create image

“One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, even among the professors with whom I work, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for - a violence.”

PeopleKindWarCountryGovernmentBeliefFearViolencePolicyAmountSafetyTerrorAcceptedEducatedOur TimeCollectivesParadoxProfessorsSuspicionCousinMaintainingWar On TerrorMy Cousin
Author:Eula Biss
Create image