Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.

When a baby first looks at you...when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you...then you are-happy is not the precise word-filled.

'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.

there's no justice, there's only love.

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.

The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.