I have spoken about what we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have to shatter our complacency and become "active souls,"and be prepared to engage in aware - that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't think we have any choice.

I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.

I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.

I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears.

The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.

There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.