You can't save a person who doesn't want to be saved. It was like Mr. Eddie always told the new gardeners: Everybody's got to kill their own snakes.

...no woman can love a weak man hard enough to make him strong.

Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.

...freedom can be a full-time job if you let it.

you can't know the meaning of the lesson until class is over!

When you're young, there's a whole lot of stuff you say you'll never do. Once you get a little older, the list tends to get shorter.

Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music.

Feminism is to sexism what black nationalism is to racism; the most rational response to the problem.

the problem with knowing is that it takes away the possibility of pretending!

old habits are hard to break, but not impossible!

Vera Stark is a fabulous force of nature.

Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

Let's all try to conserve water. But it's OK to shower.

I'd like to jump out of an airplane, but I'm very scared of that. I will have to do it.

I tend to integrate poet and scholar is by ironizing the scholarship. My hope is to disturb that space between the two so they can coexist in a kind of mutual uncertainty.

To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.

It doesn't matter what I think I am, it matters what I do.

I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone.

What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.

It took me a long time to find my voice as a singer, and I'm happy that I did.