Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read — something most important what I should not try to write.
Don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different…” from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.
My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.
I made my life, the same way it looks like you’re gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you’re mad at. You better think hard.
Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.