The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

• The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
• There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
• I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
• I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
• The clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible that is, that one is male and the other female.
• I'm sure not afraid of success and I've learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I'm afraid of now is of being someone I don't like much.
• In the family sandwich, the older people and the younger ones can recognize one another as the bread. Those in the middle are, for a time, the meat.
• Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
• Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.
• I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.