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

as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.

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

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job" -- there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.

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.

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