Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

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.

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

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

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.

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

maturity ... is letting things happen.