“That single moment's intensity hasn't been matched in my life before or since. A woman I didn't know had chosen to accept me, in body and mind. Perhaps it is this instant that forms the basis of tr...”

“Amma and i went to each house to tell them we were leaving. They all said, 'Don't forget us. Keep visiting.' At the age I was then, this seemed absurd. i had grown up among them - how was it even p...”

“Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within.”

“When you have no choice, you have no discontent either.”

“We had no compunction toward our enemies [the ants] and took to increasingly desperate and violent means of dealing with them. If we noticed they'd laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a ci...”

“Appa enjoys our current prosperity with considerable hesitation, as if it were undeserved. Hes given to quoting a proverb that says wealth shouldnt strike suddenly like a visitation, but instead gr...”

“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...”

“To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. I...”

“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle th...”

“Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage about what wed do,...”

“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.”