Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.

... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

There is always a time to make right what is wrong.

Society, like nature, is one body, really.