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

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.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

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

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

The journey is over. Love to all.