“I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable--but I always was so, only I never knew it!”

“May your heart be mine, may my heart be yours. May your sorrows be mine, may my joys be yours.”

“Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on t...”

“The dream is not a drug but a way. Listen to where it can take you.”

“Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the hear...”

“I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“Rejection is a common occurrence. Learning that early and often will help you build up the tolerance and resistance to keep going and keep trying.”

“Just, whenever you can, get up and sing at a gig or jam. If you have a chance, take it and keep on getting up. Keep going - but not If people boo, 'cause that's just mean. I think that could be set...”

“I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”