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

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

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]

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

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they've contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.

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.