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

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

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]

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes; it suggests, further, a full range of experience…it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings choose their places without regard to propriety or custom.

The journey is over. Love to all.

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

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