To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.

We in middle age require adventure.

Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.

You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.

New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a lover or hater.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

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]