I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense.

I think about Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing.' What a radical idea that sex was healing. I learned my politics through that music.

When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.

I can only describe it as: the whole experience was imprinted on my body. And when I started to write it, it just came from such a very, In The Body of the Worldvery physical... it just came from my body. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I guess my head was transmitting it. It was a very, very physical experience writing this book.

Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.

My commitment originated in my own story and my own relationship to violence.

Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship.