We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

Go to bed; tired is stupid.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.