It's just the woman—the woman who doesn't have a child is looked at with the same aversion and reproach as a grown man who doesn't have a job. Like she has something to apologize for. Like she's not entitled to pride.

Do you ever feel like you cannot grow beyond your mother? So it's wonderful when your mother climbs one step higher on the ladder from where she had been standing before.

…I felt different, as though floor I could choose the happiness of that smiling face, or the unhappiness of my mother. Not everything had to be so heavy all the time. But how deep inside me my mother's face was! How it lay in the basement, the unfinished barn, of my soul so close, right there.

The whole world needs to be mothered…

There is always someone ready to step into the path of a woman's freedom, sensing that she is not yet a mother, so tries to make her into one. There will always be one man or another, or her mother or her father, or some young woman or some young man who steps into the bright and shimmering path of her freedom, and adopts themselves as that woman's child, forcing her to be their mother…The world is full of desperate people, lonely people and half-broken people, unsolved people and needy people…who need your advice at every turn, or who just want to talk and get a drink—and seduce you into being their mother. It's hard to detect this is even happening, bu before you realize it—it's happened.

In my dream last night, I heard the words, If you want to know what your life is, destroy everything and move away and see what builds up again. If what builds up a second time is much the same as the first, then your life is pretty much as it could be. Things couldn't be much different from that.

To go along with what nature demands and to resist it—both are really beautiful—impressive and difficult in their ovwn ways. To battle nature and to submit to nature, both feel very worthy. They both seem entirely valuable.

Desires build up lives, he warned. He feared that if he began to follow his desires, he would end up buried underneath whatever they collected, until his whole self disappeared.

The time-span of a woman's life is about thirty years. Apparently, during these thirty years—fourteen to forty-four—everything must be done. She must find a man, make babies, start and accelerate her career, avoid diseases, and collect enough money in a private account so that her husband can't gamble their life's savings away. Thirty years is not enough time to live a whole life! It's not enough time to do all of everything….

All the things I neglected to do because I refused to believe, fundamentally, that first and foremost I was female.

Time is always ticking for Women. Whereas men, apparently, live in a timeless realm. In the dimension of men, there is no just space. Imagine living in the realm of space, not time!

Maybe motherhood means honoring one's mother. Many people do that by becoming mothers. They do it by having children. They do it by imitating what their mother has done. By imitating and honoring what their mother has done, this makes them a mother.

I also am imitating what my mother has done. I am also honoring my mother, no less than the person whose mother feels honored by an infant grandchild. I am honoring my mother no less. I do as my mother did, and for the same reasons: we work to give our mother's life meaning.

It does not mean that to write this book, I need an infinity amount of time, but rather that I need to access infinity in time. Infinity is not a duration of time, it is a quality of time.

Maybe this is what happens with children, also, which is perhaps partly why people want to have more than one. The baby's perfect innocence and purity is gone, corrupted as they grow. The same thing happens with art. It starts off in a state of perfect innocence, and you along with it.

Putting the book down, I realized that throughout most of history, it was enough for men that women existed to give birth and raise them. And if a woman gave birth to a girl, well then, with luck the girl would grow up to give birth to a man. It seemed to me like all my worrying about not being a mother came down to this history—this implication that a woman is not an end in herselt. She is a means to a man, who will grow up to be an end in himself, and do something in the world. While woman is a passageway through which a man might come.

True perspective is pretty much impossible. The buildings do not sway in the wind, so it's harder for our ideas to sway. You cannot look at a building for several hours, while in nature you can look at anything for several hours, because nature is alive and ever-changing.

Life involves making a decision so the spirits can rush in. But a decision takes knowledge and faith, which I lack.

Art is eternity backwards. Art is written for one's ancestors, even if those ancestors are elected, like our literary mothers and fathers are. We write for them. Children are eternity forwards. My sense of eternity is backwards through time. The farther back in time l can go, the deeper into eternity I feel I can pierce.

My brother feels it was an unfair burden placed on him to have been forced to live without having been asked. I feel the oppositethat life is a beautiful and incredibly rare gift whose debt I will forever be in—and that I must spend my days paying back this debt.

Where do I get this idea of my indebtedness from? And who am I paying it back to? And why must it be the only thing in my life—my life paying it back? Could having children be a way of repaying the debt? For some it must be, but it doesnt feel that Way to me. I know how hard it is to have a child, but for me it Would feel like an indulgence—an escape. I don't feel I deserve those pleasures. Having a child does not relate to the duties that feel bound to my life.

… I wondered if not having children was more like creating a context, while having a baby was more like making a thing. As with an artist who makes objects to sell, it's easy to reward someone for having a child—the meaning of their life is so apparent in its solidness and worth.

Men want to control women 's bodies by forbidding them from abortions, while women try to control other women's bodies by pressuring them to have kids.

To find our value and greatness in some place apart from mothering, as a man must find his worth and greatness in some place apart from domination and violence, and the more women and men who do this, the better off the world will be? Miles said we value warring and dominating men, the same way we revere the mother. The egoism of child-bearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country—both carry the wish of imprinting yourself on the world, and making it over with your values, and in your image. How assaulted I feel when I hear that a person has had three children, four, five, more…It feels greedy, overbearing and rude—an arrogant spreading of those selves.

Yet perhaps I am not so different from such people—spreading myself over so many pages, with my dream of my pages spreading over the world.

I don't have anything anymore. I don't have my work .. my daughter is her own person. She doesn't belong to me.

In that moment, I saw it was true: her daughter was something apart from her, not her possession or belonging at all.

A child is not a combination of you and your partner, but a reality all its own, separate and uniquea distinct point of consciousness in the world. I don't think this was something I ever felt that my body, my life, belonged to me.

What Ineed is so small: to eradicate any sentimentality from my feelings and to look at what is. Today, I defined sentimental to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling. And it seemed to me that my inclinations towards motherhood had a lot to with the idea of a feeling about motherhood.

If a decision in the mind doesnt make balbies, why do I spend so much time thinking about it? We are judged by what happens to us as though our deciding made it happen. A lot of time is wasted in thinking about whether to have a child, when the thinking is such a small part of it…