Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later.

Work-family conflicts - the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child - would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.

I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual liberation, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.

What I often say to people who are quick to say I’m not a feminist is if you think you’re not a feminist, give it all back.