What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.