“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

“Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?”

“Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.”

“Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.”

“She has given me a way out.”

“Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of gr...”

“I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about i...”

“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be r...”

“I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are goin...”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“My story is of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.”

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,00...”

“Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”