. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.

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]

Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.

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.

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.

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

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.