“All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.”

“Every woman knows what I'm talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. . . everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative wa...”

“How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that's forever just around the corner, out of reach? It...”

“Families are like little villages. You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, unti...”

“I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun wha...”

“When people ask me what L.A. was like in the sixties, I tell them there wasn't as much terrible stucco as there is today: no mini malls with their approximation of Spanish two-story buildings, no o...”

“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constan...”

“... the effort to discover an authentic self, to strip away layers of alienation and culturally imposed identity and find a soul in a clear, unimpeded communion with the sacred is consonant with sp...”

“I'm a queen with or without a king. Chasing anything is beneath me. Until you're ready to put away childish things and be my man, my king, someone I can trust to shepard my soul to the Almighty I h...”

“After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.”

“A wise person knows that he should not allow his roots to grow too deep in this world, for the deeper they grow here, the shallower they become in spirituality.”

“Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.”

“I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to...”