Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.