I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures.

Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.