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

[On her mastectomy:] Pity is delicious. I was crazy about the pity I got. It was the best kind, too. I did not get, nor did I want, the drooling, mewing kind. I preferred something more restrained but deep-felt. Quality pity.

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.

The notion that the maternal wish and the activity of mothering are instinctive or biologically predestined is baloney.

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

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.

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.