Raunchy is better.

“Dear Mom. It’s market day in Cortona. The piazza is an ongoing party, and everyone is invited. Clichés converge at this navel of the world. You almost want to laugh, but you can’t help feeling these Italians know more about having fun than we do. I eat a hot grape from the market, and the violet sweetness breaks open in my mouth. It even smells purple. I wish I could stay longer, but the bell reminds me of time. "Ding-dang-dong, ” the bell says, instead of “ding-dong. ” I wish you were here.“

the thing you are most afraid to write. write that.

I have a body, you are likely to say if you talk about embodiment at all; you don’t say, I am a body. A body is a separate entity possessable by the “I”. …To widen the rift between the self and the body, we treat our bodies as subordinates, inferior in moral status. Open association with them shames us. In fact, we treat our bodies with very much the same distance and ambivalence women have traditionally received from men in our culture. Sometimes this treatment is benevolent, even respectful, but all too often it is tainted by outright sadism.

This is what we can all do to nourish and strengthen one another: listen to one another very hard, ask questions, too, send one another away to work again, and laugh in all the right places.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

I have come to believe…that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

…I had felt as if I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more.