Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.

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

Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

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

This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.