“In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,a yam of a woman of butter and brass,”

“A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.”

“If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government…I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away.”

“Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American.”

“Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.”

“She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately.”

“Attention is love, what we must givechildren, mothers, fathers, pets,our friends, the news, the woes of others.What we want to change we curse and thenpick up a tool. Bless whatever you canwith eyes and hands and tongue. If youcan't bless it, get ready to make it new.”