Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

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

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

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

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

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]

Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.