It doesn't matter where we begin the personal/political circle, but it matters desperately that we complete it.

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.

Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's agethat familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth oridentity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.

If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

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.

[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.