“Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas, terrapins, catfish--anything that didn't bite you first.”

“If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.”

“The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.”

“They founded a society based not upon currency and commodities but on the elementary notion that if you failed to raise enough to eat, you would go hungry.”

“We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place -- we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else.”

“My Chicken can do a special trick!"And what is that?"She can lay an egg!"And what's so special about THAT?!"Well, Can YOU lay an egg?”

“If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that.”