I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

There is no love for God without love for man

You are an atheist if you do not believe in yourself

The journey to greatness is a marathon, not a hundred meter dash.

Sara: Tegan just recently discovered that unicorns don’t exist. Tegan: I just thought they were extinct.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

You cannot forget about your femininity. You don't have to compete with men in that respect.

The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

The suburbs: signs of life, but no proofs.

What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government ... it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which means arbitrary power.

All my life I've tried to hide my height. I was taller than everybody else and stood out, so I would slouch and try to hide it.