Having and Being Had Quotes

“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, Having and Being Had

“Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“The more comfortable we are, research suggests, the more destruction we are likely to be causing.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“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, Having and Being Had

“Piff and his team of researchers found that the rich are more likely than the poor to cut off other vehicles when driving through intersections. And they’re less likely to stop for pedestrians. They’re more likely to cheat in a game, and more likely to think of greed as good. But money is not to blame for this, Piff suggests. What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“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, Having and Being Had

“Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“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, Having and Being Had

“Art unmakes the world made by work.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Precocity is not the price of riding a bicycle, I think, so much as what it has to offer. Wind, a rush of blood, fissures and pits in the asphalt, an errant animal, eyes in a mirror, glint of sunlight on chrome, scent of lake water, catcalls, a soaring feeling. But that is not to say that liberation doesn't have a price.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“A bicycle in traffic must be predictive to the point of clairvoyance, must know the cars better than the cars know themselves, must understand their motivations and their common blunders. Cars don't always signal their intentions. And cars aren't always nice to each other, though they usually show each other some respect in deference to the damage they can do to each other. They are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“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.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Why is water so often a metaphor for money? Perhaps because we like to believe that our economic system is naturally occurring, not man-made. Maybe the movement of money feels inevitable if you imagine it as water, with only blameless gravity participating in the accumulation of wealth.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“I have passed through several classes in my adult life, including the precariat. But I don’t believe that to be true. I have always remained, more or less, in the class into which I was born.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired, like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“The middle class, in this approach, lies between the capitalists who have control and the workers who are controlled. The middle class includes small-business owners who are both capitalists and workers, salaried managers and supervisors whose financial interests are entangled with the corporations they serve, and educated professionals who have enough capital to make investments. This is a middle class with capitalist aspirations. And that is why Marx considered this class dangerous. It is a class of conflicting allegiances and internal contradictions.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“The musician breaks the rules of work by playing, rather than working. It’s queer, in that it’s a transgression.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“The game was informed by the theories of Henry George, who proposed that profits made from a natural resource, like land or coal or oil, should be distributed equally among everyone. No individual, he argued, should build a fortune by laying claim to a collective resource.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“I’ve been reading the psychologist Paul Piff, who quotes Jesus in a paper titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.” Piff and his team of researchers found that the rich are more likely than the poor to cut off other vehicles when driving through intersections. And they’re less likely to stop for pedestrians. They’re more likely to cheat in a game, and more likely to think of greed as good. But money is not to blame for this, Piff suggests. What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Nearly all people in nearly all nations, for nearly all of human history, he observes, have been poor. Widespread poverty is not an anomaly. But widespread affluence is.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“A poem is something that happens between people, O’Hara insisted in his manifesto for Personism,”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“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, Having and Being Had

“The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have,” James Baldwin writes. You can’t be a traitor if you’ve never been a citizen.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Maintenance, she wrote, was the work of protecting progress, sustaining change, preserving the new, and keeping the dust off invention.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“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, Having and Being Had

“TIAA is the largest agricultural investor in the world, the third largest commercial real estate manager in the world, and number 80 on the Fortune 500.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had