I Have A Terrible Memory.

I Think I Would Have Died If There Hadn't Been The Women's Movement. It Gave Me A Vision That I Could Do Something Different, And It Gave Me An Understanding That I Wasn't A Monster, Or Sport, Or A Betrayer Of My Family.

He Never Said "don't Tell Your Mama." He Never Had To Say It. I Did Not Know How To Tell Anyone What I Felt, What Scared Me And Shamed Me... (109)

I Did Things I Did Not Understand For Reasons I Could Not Begin To Explain Just To Be In Motion, To Be Trying To Do Something, Change Something In A World I Wanted Desperately To Make Over But Could Not Imagine For Myself.

Beauty Is A Hard Thing. Beauty Is A Mean Story. Beauty Is Slender Girls Who Die Young, Fine-featured Delicate Creatures About Whom Men Write Poems. Beauty, My First Girlfriend Said To Me, Is That Inner Quality Often Associated With Great Amounts Of Leisure Time. And I Loved Her For That.

... Suffering Does Not Ennoble. It Destroys. To Resist Destruction, Self-hatred, Or Lifelong Hopelessness, We Have To Throw Off The Conditioning Of Being Despised, The Fear Of Becoming The They That Is Talked About So Dismissively, To Refuse Lying Myths And Easy Moralities, To See Ourselves As Human, Flawed, And Extraordinary. All Of Us Extraordinary