Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Denounce useless guilt. Don’t make a cult of suffering. Live in the now(or at least the soon). Always do the things you fear most. Courage is an acquired taste like caviar. Trust all joy. If the evil eye fixes you in its gaze, look elsewhere. Get ready to be 87.

My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

O what is it about having one's own Babe upon one's Hip that makes a Woman wish to go home to her Mother? A Desire to say: 'Look, the Circle is compleat'? A Desire to say: 'Look, I have cross'd the Divide and now am more like you'? A Desire to say: 'Look, this Babe I offer you is my most precious Gift'?