My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

This kind of split makes me crazy, this territorializing of the holy. Here God may dwell. Here God may not dwell. It contradicts everything in my experience, which says: God dwells where I dwell. Period.

God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.