“The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's nev...”

“While falling in love is fun, it's not everything, and it's not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.”

“For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl ...”

“If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, its clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young womens sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about ho...”

“As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, t...”

“Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters- not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex ...”

“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.”

“He had a charm about him sometimes, a warmth that was irresistible, like sunshine. He planted Saffy triumphantly on the pavement, opened the taxi door, slung in his bag, gave a huge film-star wave,...”

“He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.”

“1. I think what haunts many people in the world is to lose something they love, something they value, and someone they care for, for me it was my father, I was losing him when I met him. I felt lif...”

“I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.”

“I felt like a failure, like somehow my self-worth was tied to my ability to procreate. I didn't feel like I could talk about it. I did not want other people's pity, so I mostly kept my story and my...”

“My failures may be my greatest successes. It is in failure that I have often drawn closer to God, learn to depend more on Him than myself, gained self-knowledge, and seen things in their right pers...”