To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.

Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nce in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.

We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

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.

We have to know before we can act.