"Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular."

"We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach."

"My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you."

"Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie, there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie."

"Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body."

"I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise."

"Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power."

"Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry."

"Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience."

"I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner."

"Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves."

"Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days."

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

"Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight."

"Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice."

"For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable."

"Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward."

"If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story."

"We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth."

"I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility with no history to guide them and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words."

"Most women are one man away from welfare."

"Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!"

"It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous."

"Self-esteem isn't everything it's just that there's nothing without it."

"I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing."

"Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself."

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."

"Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father."

"Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before."

"A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means."

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."

"God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back."

"A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after."

"We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know."

"Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it-and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it."

"Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person."

"If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society."

"Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other."

"It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave."

"Our grief is not a cry for war."That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here."

"Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed."

"Hate generalizes, love specifies."

"In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be."

"The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please."

"Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River."

"One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart."

"If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something."

"Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't."

"But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead."

"In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: "Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive."