I think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.

The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.

It's endlessly interesting to be organizing and hearing possible solutions or thinking of possible solutions and how to put efforts together. It makes everything else boring, actually.

We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.

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

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

I spend a lot of time on college campuses, and I don't quite understand where the idea comes from that young women are not moving forward. In fact, statistically, if you look at the public opinion polls, young women are much more supportive of feminism and feminist issues than older women are.