Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.

Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.

I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.

Changing husbands is only changing troubles.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.

They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.

I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.