That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

Not everybody feels religion the same way. Some it's in their mouth, but some it's like a hope in their blood, their bones.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.