You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?