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.

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

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.

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.

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

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.