If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference.

Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

Some women and men seem to need each other.

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.