Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

If things had been different, she would be in Carolyn's place right now. She didn't want that sort of existence, but there was something so attractive about the security of feeling like you had stopped moving toward your life, and actually arrived.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

We don't always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can't find a way to love us anyway.

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.