Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

To surrender one's vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

There are no inanimate objects.

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.