And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

There's something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.

I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human.