“One of the best signs of being fitted for power is reluctance to hold it.”

“It isn’t right that one human being can hold such power over another. One person’s reality is another person’s crazy. Aren’t crazy people just regular people who don’t fit into someone else’s version of normal and acceptable behavior?”

“The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

“Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.”

“Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested...Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification.”

“Happiness depends on one being exactly fitted to the nature of one's work.”