“Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.”

“What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?”

“Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.”

“It is a long Baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion and in pain than to live untouched. Yet how will you sustain?”

“There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.”

“The time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us today... ...some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.”

“Then the silence came back, that awful silence that seemed to just take over.In that silence I kept hearing what I had said--heard it repeating itself over and over again like a stuck record. I wanted it to stop. I didn't want to say things like that anymore. I was sick of that kind of lying. I wished I could say something real.But the silence was too big.”