One of our biggest problems in terms of effectiveness is that we have hopes, but our opposition has interests. We measure everything against our hopes, including politicians that we are voting for or choosing amongst. We don't measure up to our hopes ourselves.

I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

I wasn't even in a newspaper office where I was getting assignments in competition with other people. I remember earlier, though, that I knew a young woman who had been published in the New Yorker, and I was so jealous of her. It wasn't exactly a personal competition. I just envied that accomplishment.

Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.

Where men come to and women come together most intimately in sexuality in the home has become suffused with violence.

We need to take violence against women seriously. It is the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent inside itself, and whether it will be militarily violent against another country.

What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?