Top 50 Eula Biss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An apology is also an admission of guilt.”

— Eula Biss

2. “Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.”

— Eula Biss

3. “True empowerment of students, I came to realize, necessarily means a certain disempowerment of teachers.”

— Eula Biss

4. “But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear.”

— Eula Biss

5. “However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other’s environment. Immunity is a shared space – a garden we tend together.”

— Eula Biss

6. “A trust-in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong-captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.”

— Eula Biss

7. “Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century.”

— Eula Biss

8. “If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.”

— Eula Biss

9. “Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seems to disrupt – a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.”

— Eula Biss

10. “Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.”

— Eula Biss

11. “Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared.”

— Eula Biss

12. “There are some words that seem to well up from inside me without reason. I will be walking along an empty hallway, leaning against the wall of an elevator, looking at the ceiling of my apartment when I find myself saying, “sorry.” But I am not saying it to anyone else, it is only for the sound of the word, the feel of it.”

— Eula Biss

13. “While we routinely call for more vaccine testing, and more human trials, the unspoken assumption is that we do not intend our children to be the subjects of those trials.”

— Eula Biss

14. “We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.”

— Eula Biss

15. “For toxicologists, “the dose makes the poison.” Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.”

— Eula Biss

16. “Sonata,” he says, “means ‘sounding together.’ It is an argument in which one theme is presented in opposition to another and they struggle until one wins, in the resolution. It is a beautiful form, it has endured into this century.”

— Eula Biss

17. “Words like ‘custody’ don’t mean the same thing to him. I don’t want us to own anything together. “You don’t want to be happy,” he accuses me.”

— Eula Biss

18. “We do not know alone. Dracula.”

— Eula Biss

19. “Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.”

— Eula Biss

20. “Debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.”

— Eula Biss

21. “The opportunity to think with another mind is my preferred mode of travel.”

— Eula Biss

22. “The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children’s book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.”

— Eula Biss

23. “Caretaking, she suggests, is not an inherent threat to liberty. “From a feminist, caring framework,” Peterson writes, “liberty is not defined as complete separation and independence from the parent.” If fathering still reminds us of oppressive control, mothering might help us imagine relationships based not just on power, but also care.”

— Eula Biss

24. “And I suspect that Coca-Cola, unpoisoned, is more harmful to our children than vaccination.”

— Eula Biss

25. “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.”

— Eula Biss

26. “Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.”

— Eula Biss

27. “We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most dangerous creature on earth.”

— Eula Biss

28. “This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community.”

— Eula Biss

29. “If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love.”

— Eula Biss

30. “We had been arguing for hours and it was dark in the room. We sat silently on the couch, I was tapping my foot against the table. He glanced at the green digital glow of the clock. “2:05 is beautiful,” he said. I looked, and it was.”

— Eula Biss

31. “The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.”

— Eula Biss

32. “Maintenance is the tax I pay on this life, I think. And that is why I want to do it by hand, with heavy shears.”

— Eula Biss

33. “By then I had moved often enough not to have the usual illusions about a clean slate or a fresh start or a new life. I knew that I could not escape myself. And the idea of beginning again, with no furniture and no friends, was exhausting. So my happiness then is hard to explain. I am tempted now to believe that entering the life one is meant to inhabit is a thrilling sensation and that is all.”

— Eula Biss

34. “The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.”

— Eula Biss

35. “I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.”

— Eula Biss

36. “She was poisoned, but the reason she was crying was that her husband didn’t want her anymore.”

— Eula Biss

37. “If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.”

— Eula Biss

38. “Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.”

— Eula Biss

39. “In France, a law now requires large companies not to expect their employees to send or respond to emails after work hours.”

— Eula Biss

40. “Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes, “is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.”

— Eula Biss

41. “The more comfortable we are, research suggests, the more destruction we are likely to be causing.”

— Eula Biss

42. “Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake.”

— Eula Biss

43. “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.”

— Eula Biss

44. “Speaking of privilege, David said when he gave me her biography, it is a privilege to spend your life writing. Not a luxury, he clarified, but a privilege.”

— Eula Biss

45. “When I started riding a bike I realized there’s a real relationship between a body powering itself going down the street and the way you interact with your community,” Smith says. “The violence of the power of a car is an alienating device. It’s the last thing we need in our neighborhoods.”

— Eula Biss

46. “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.”

— Eula Biss

47. “I begin my days by practicing piano, which I do badly but with ardor. Then I read for a while. I write until I’m too hungry to keep writing and then after lunch I spend some time in my garden before writing again. I want to also study French, but I rarely do. As I meander my way through one of these days, it occurs to me that my work life resembles the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.”

— Eula Biss

48. “Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.”

— Eula Biss

49. “I once met a man of pro-football-sized proportions who saw something in my hesitation when I shook his hand that inspired him to tell me he was pained by the way small women looked at him when he passed them on the street – pained by the fear in their eyes, pained by the way they drew away – and as he told me this, tears welled up in his eyes.”

— Eula Biss

50. “One of the most frightening things about children, in my experience, is their intelligence. They inevitably know more than we suspect them of knowing. They appraise us with devastating accuracy. And they are aware of injustices we have learned to ignore.”

— Eula Biss