People always blame the girl she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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 you never even needed to put it on display.
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 of young children.
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 treated.
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 greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
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.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
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.
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 are not imperfect, how can we equal them?
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.
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.
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 would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
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.
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.
The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.