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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Maybe it was more than that. Maybe some things shouldn't be explained.”

“The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses.”