How deep is our desire to do better than our mothers--to bring daughters into adulthood strong and fierce yet loving and gentle, adventurous and competitive but still nurturing and friendly, sweet yet sharp. We know as working women that we can't quite have it all, but that hasn't stopped us from wanting it all for them.

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

A person who has no secrets is a liar. We always fold ourselves away from others just enough to preserve a secret or two, something that we cannot share without destroying our inner landscape.

I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what's really going on.

Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.

I believe that it is our human right to be parents and women. And there's no contradiction between feminism, which means women should have all that they are entitled to, all that they can do, all the opportunities that they can take advantage of they should have.