Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.

Now what? All the battles feminists won about not being a sex object, not being evaluated based on these things, that now other generations are wallowing in, the extremes they go to, to look sexually attractive? It's stunning how things that one fought desperately for are just being tossed aside with aplomb.

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.