That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.

No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.

To feel like a woman, wear heels, to feel like a goddess, wear five inches.

I don't want to impede free press, by the way. The last thing I would want to do is that.

My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist.

In such misfortunes my Mother was of an heroic spirit, in suffering patiently when there was no remedy, and being industrious where she thought she could help.

Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward [God].

My father was the Formica King of Long Island, and my mother was the daughter of a Bengal Lancer in India.