Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

It's not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.