Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.

The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass.

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.