Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportune places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.

I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.