Quote

I don't think I really realized what being an adult and being a real grownup was until I was at least twenty-eight.

When I was 18 I was just absorbing everything around me: whatever happens, happens. I was so naive and willing to ride whatever wave life threw at me.

Well, in order to become a grown man, in order to become significant in my family and significant in my children's life, I had to learn my lessons.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

I was only 24 then, but 18 of those 24 years had been dedicated to wanting to get to that moment.

I wish when I was 17, somebody had told me not to care so much about what other people had thought.

Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

I grew up in a family in which no male upstream from me had ever finished high school, much less gone to college. But I was taught that even though there was nothing I could do about what was behind me, I could change everything about what was in front of me. My working poor parents told me that I could do better.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.