“She threw herself across her bed, weeping into a pillow. She knew just what she wanted -- the desire was a fierce ache inside her. But fiercer still was the knowledge that it was beyond the reach o...”

“Nafsha is so concerned with my virginity. I am beginning to think she would wed me herself. Alas, the only tool she might use to make me a woman is her tongue -- and it is far too sharp for me to a...”

“In the dull, persistent beat of her heart, she hears the rhythm of hope. It is faint and thin as a thread, but it is there.”

“Her voice is still pitched high, thanks to her youth, but it has a certain incipient darkness to it, a low richness that will mature in the coming years to the smoky tones of a priestess or a queen...”

“Men always laugh whenever a woman says she has political skill. But it's not such a difficult thing to master.”

“She will not bow her head to any woman or man, so why, indeed, should she bow to a needle?”

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more complet...”

“All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

“Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.”

“The best boss is the one who bosses the least.”

“But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.""It might to keep it open.”

“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...”