The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.