("Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself.")

"Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who'd grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealymouthed because she didn't hate her mother or herself. 

'Isadora!' 

What I really wanted was to give birth to myself--the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world. I hugged my knees. I felt strangely safe there, under my mother's fur coat. 

'Isadora!'..."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

"I congratulate myself on every successful takeoff, but not too enthusiastically because it's also part of my personal religion that the minute you grow overconfident and really relax about the flight, the plane crashes instantly. Constant vigilance, that's my motto. A mood of cautious optimism should prevail. But actually my mood is better described as cautious pessimism."

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)

achievement of mastery

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990)
"--he has been buried in the earth for two-thousand years; he was found in a tomb."

Psycho III (1986)

The open window
(propped by weathered wood swelling
against stiles and jambs)

pipes low-sodic light
across my lightless bedroom
and motions mute chimes

onto the surface
of a burnt-out fireplace
(like a woody pit).

The Paper Chase (1973)

"I breathed. I began to wake up. I stretched and yawned in the soul I had forgotten, and the waking took months and years. I awoke a little more each spring and found rest for my weariness each enfolding winter. I shed more of my multicolored armor each fall. I was lucid in the warm of summer. I opened my eyes. I opened. I started noticing things. I noticed how alike the gorillas and I were. Sometimes I was filled with joy, and I wanted to shout, 'There are other real and gentle people among us! Human people are not alone! Look! Look!' Instead I stayed silent and I wrote about the gorillas--reams and reams--but ripped it all up and threw it away because it as all too private and I couldn't bear the thought of anyone seeing it."

Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Dawn Prince-Hughes

"The word would seem different somehow, taking on new properties, as I passed my cherished landmarks. 'Hippopotamus!' I would say as I passed the first leg of my journey, my grandparents' bedroom, where the word would absorb the comfort of my grandparents' bed, their clothing, the beauty of my grandmother's vanity table, and the smell of cedar drawers; then on to the bathroom yelling 'Hippopotamus!' where the word would absorb the smell of antiseptic, toilet bowl cleaner, baby powder, perfume, and toothpaste; through the second bedroom, where the word would absorb the light from the fixture on the ceiling, with its fascinating mobile. 'Hippopotamus, Hippopotamus!' I would repeat; I would veer around the corner where the front door stood across from the stairs going to the second floor, where the word would assimilate the power of the dark stairwell; I hurried on through the living room, where the television was always on, and the word would be injected with whatever scene was on the screen."

Songs of the Gorilla Nation, Dawn Prince-Hughes