To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

All my friends are artists, so I am used to collective agony as a mode.

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.