Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.