“Always respect Mother Nature. Especially when she weighs 400 pounds and is guarding her baby.”

“People talk about nature as a mother, but to me she's always been Medea, ready and willing to slaughter her children.”

“Her mother called to her. She said, "Where are you going, Flora Belle?"
Flora didn't answer her. She never answered her mother when she called her Flora Belle.
Sometimes she didn't answer her mother when she called her Flora either.”

“I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.”

“(Gordon Mitchell) weighed 220 pounds when he did these muscle pictures, and he went down to 160 pounds for this movie, like nothing.”

“It's a natural achievement,
Conquering my homework
With her image pounding in my brain.
She's an inspiration
For my graduation,
And she helps to keep the classroom sane.”

“Scent:
When she wore the hat, even many years later, she could always smell her mother's perfume & it was hard to remember she was supposed to be alone.”

“I would not send a poor girl into the world, ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.”

“The woman who fights against her father still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature.”

“I like it when my mother smiles. And I especially like it when I make her smile.”