Quotes from Allegra Goodman

Women hate each other in science. You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.

How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.

People ask every day, "Why was I put on earth?" As if there is perhaps one reason. The truth is that there are too many reasons to count, and each reason and each soul connects to every other

Though experience should be our guide . . . and we see mistakes are common at the age of twenty-three, it must be acknowledged that not every youthful feeling begins unworthily and ends in error. If this were the case, mankind would have perished long ago.

Prophecy is a poetry of change, social, political, moral, spiritual. It was with the prophetic model in mind that Shelley wrote of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Women hate each other in science. You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.

We've got an acquisitive gene. We want and want, and there's no way around it.

The new one actually reads, but only to pass judgment. This is the way kids learn today. Someone told them how you feel is more important than what you know, and so they think accusations are ideas. This is political correction run amok.

Leaving this changeling for George, she washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she'd ever know, that what was sweet could also be so complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other.

Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves.... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers.... Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch.

I have a dark sense of humor,' Fanny explained. 'What's that supposed to mean?' asked Honor. 'It means I'm funny once you get to know me,' Fanny said.

He draws asparagus and cabbages, but he's obsessed with artichokes. He draws them more than any other vegetable. Why artichokes?" George drained his glass. "The artichoke is a sexy beast. Thorns to cut you, leaves to peel, lighter and lighter as you strip away the outer layers, until you reach the soft heart's core.

The roses bloomed, thousands of them in a floral amphitheater, blossoms shading from gold and coral at the top of the garden to scarlet and deep pink on tiers below. At the bottom, in the center of the rosy congregation, the palest apricots and ivories perfumed the air.

I want to give back." He looked at her and said in all seriousness, "Why? What did you take?

She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn't believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt.

He felt poor, as well, although he didn't consider himself poor. He considered himself free.

Reading was like visiting distant friends.

Talent and intelligence, not to mention tireless hard work, got lab scientists through the door, but—this was the dirty secret—you needed luck.

Collin sat on a marble bench, chaste white, funereal, carved with the words PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. When he opened his arms for Nina, a guard hurried over. "Sir! I'm sorry—you can't sit there!

You're a throwback. To what? Jess considered this. Hi-tech at work, Emily was paradoxically old-fashioned in her life. She didn't even own a television. The nineteenth century, Jess concluded. No. Eighteenth. You can be eighteenth. I'll be nineteenth. I never pictured you as a Victorian. No, early nineteenth century, said Jess, who had always been a stickler when it came to imaginary games and books. The Blue Fairy, not Tinker Bell. Lucy, not Susan. Jo, not Amy. Austen, not the Brontes.

He said, "I had to dance with all the girls who didn't have a partner. I'd be the youngest one, and I was like a foot shorter, so I was staring straight at all these eighth-grade breasts." "Sh!" "What? It was like the highlight of my childhood.

know winning isn't everything and if all you care about is winning, you'll feel empty—but I haven't won enough to feel empty yet.

She had no idea how George delighted in her funny ways, or watched her through the window as she stood outside, finishing an apple or nibbling sunflower seeds. She did not register his glances, his quick inventory of her clothes, his pleasure in her face and wrists. She did not know his heart.

As soon as Sam pops the trunk, more balloons fly up into the air.