All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.

I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

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.

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.