When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.