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.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

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

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

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

The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.

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.