“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

I feel terribly vulnerable and ‘not-myself’ when I’m not writing.

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I am not cruel, only truthful.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

I dream too much, work too little.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

To me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won’t be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn’t be either.

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.

I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.