Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

The earth is for joy, and dancing is a big part of that. And you dance with nature. Nature is always dancing. If you're not harassing it and killing it and mutilating it, nature is dancing. That's what the leaves are doing when the wind blows through them. We live in a magical wonderful universe. And just spoil it while thinking we can at some point go to heaven or some other planet.

What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they'll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say.

You must run around like a crazy person or walk sedately honoring the dead.

In order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there's a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.