My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of ….

I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to r….

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground..

One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, t….

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play..

Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so m….

A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it open….

Every baby born unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will ….

My idea of Hell is to be young again..

The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside d….

We may be losing the ability to understand animals who are not pets or horses. We have less contact with them. We don't (most of us) tend to know eve….

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.

People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasona….

The price of seeing is silence..

The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the ri….

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take year….

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream..

When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed..

Shared laughter is erotic too..

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use..

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of….