Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.