I'm going to stop smoking. I'm not such a good smoker, anyway. It's not in my bones. I'm gonna drop it.
I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.
We must shine with hope, stained glass windows that shape light into icons, glow like lanterns borne before a procession. Who can bear hope back into the world but us.
Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.
We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. If I give it to you, I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.
I think jeans with a little give are the smartest for a flight.
It is a strange thing to read a letter after the writer is dead - a bitter-sweet thing, in which pain and comfort are strangely mingled.
For my second novel, The Apothecary's Daughter, my editor encouraged me to think of another unusual profession for a woman to have. That led to the main character, Lilly Haswell, who finds herself doing the work of an apothecary at a time when it was illegal for women to do so.
People as well as nations perish without scriptures. The scriptures are spiritual food for our spirit, which is just as important as physical food for our body.