people who seem most hostile to my presence are those most fearful of my fate. And since their fear keeps them emotionally distant from me, they are the ones least likely to learn that my life isn't half so dismal as they assume.

Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.

I will write myself into well-being.

To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially, but simultaneously.

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

Do others, I wondered, see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive. And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely.

That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.