Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.

As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own…women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.