Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.