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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“She looked at ways to quantify life. Analytic in nature, her head almost always overruled her heart. Love it? Hate it? She wanted to KNOW it.”

“You should have dragged my butt out of bed.""Your butt's too big to drag," Taylor said.Hayley sat on the floor, facing her sister. "That means yours is too. We have the same butt, remember?""Don't remind me," Taylor said. "I see it every time you walk in front of me.”