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.

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

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.

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.

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.

Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.

The work of the world is common as mud.