Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don’t often affect the price of fish or wine.

The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren’t powerful.

By setting the passenger seat of my car far back, and opening the glove compartment, I nestle in a very large sheet of thick fiberboard. It’s big enough to hold a table easel, my big palette and a water container. Winter is not going to lock me indoors!

I am not sure how many “sins” I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably sinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them.

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I’m thirty-one.

The greatest barrier to women’s advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don’t belong out there.

We don’t get offered crises, they arrive.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.

We older women who know we aren’t heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.

If history is really relevant in today’s world, the proposition doesn’t command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.