After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'
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.
Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.
I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that...
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.
Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have...
Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.
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...
But it's important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are trea...
If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother o...
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.
A finished person is a boring person.
It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They ar...
If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
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.
My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person born on the hottest day of...
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 m...
But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.
The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered...
A man who builds his own pedestal had better use strong cement.
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