If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

Strangers are an endangered species.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.