Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.