“No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”

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?

When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.

You do live longer with bran, but you spend the last fifteen years on the toilet.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.

In the last generation we’ve moved past a U.S.-Mexico relationship that while friendly on the surface, and demilitarized for the most part, really was not a genuinely cooperative relationship.

It’s more fun with someone who really likes it. I can’t imagine having a lasting friendship with anyone who is not interested in food.

Especially last year in Ottawa, I had a whole section my grandpa got for all my family, and the skating club (supported me).

Your family immigrated to this country – whether they came over on the Mayflower or whether they came over on a raft last year.