Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.