... to be afraid is in a way to be hopeful, because to be afraid means that you haven't given up. You know it doesn't help, but you keep thrashing. The monster has you pinned to the wall, but you're not ready to say, 'Oh, hell, eat me.

unlike a disappointing marriage, disappointing motherhood cannot be terminated by divorce.

Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object. The difference is that is not all she wants to be.

in my mother's ferocious striving to give me 'everything,' she had never considered that giving me 'everything' would make me (1) different (from her), and (2) guilty (about what I got). Different and Guilty are not the stuff on which comradeship is built.

Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.

[On her mastectomy:] Fact is, I'm the same car I always was, except now I have a dent in my fender.

Disease may score a direct hit on only one member of a family, but shrapnel tears the flesh of the others.