The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures....

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme...

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so...

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

But as I peeked at my brother’s inert body….I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being...

Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and...

Given the choice, a yeast cell’s ideal state is to be diploid. But if it’s in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids....

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the...

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball....

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath...

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and...

For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.

They didn’t exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen....

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were...

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They...

During a warm winter rain … the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words.I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”.Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my...

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.