“Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.”

“Someone could save your life without you ever knowing it. It happened more than most people realized.”

“She had learned over time that to know anything was bearable. It was secrecy that could not be borne.”

“It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.”

“One of life's contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.”

“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...”

“You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep t...”

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”

“Men can be relentless," she agrees, "when they think a woman belongs to them.”

“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.”