As long as I'm facing the right direction, it doesn't matter the size of my steps.

I hope we don't have to keep going back over the same territory and winning the same rights over and over again. The battle for birth control. The battle for abortion. The parity of women's health. It's very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.

I am thinking of the onion again. . . . Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.