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

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.

Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.

Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.

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.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.