“Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.” 

“I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news” 

“Rhyming in itself is magic.” 

“Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, “But I just looked an hour ago!” 

“All movements need a few people who can’t be fired.” 

“Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.” 

“After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.” 

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.” 

“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.” 

“Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181” 

“If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.” 

“When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.” 

“she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough to ask why that is so.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.” 

“If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.” 

“The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look, instead of by our heads and hearts.” 

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.” 

“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.” 

“The simple right to reproductive freedom - to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction - is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.” 

“Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” 

“No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.” 

“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us”