“Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.”

Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.

My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

To hear, one must be silent.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.

Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

What is life without incompatible realities?

Strive with all your hearts, raise up your voices and shout, until this dark world be filled with light.

I didn’t want to see you, but you invaded my world. Every dark corner you found a way in bringing light to the lifeless and lost.” Eva

Beware of prejudice; light is good in whatsoever lamp it is burning; a rose is beautiful in whatever garden it may bloom.

I smiled and ran my hand through his dark curls. “So, Death, what do we do now?

I love love stories, no matter how dark.

There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are “like” someone in love sounds right.

This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.