The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.

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

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]

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

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

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.

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