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]

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.

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

A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.

The rare, delicate flavor of a life after retiring in one's sixties, whatever one has "retired" from, the pleasure I experienced beyond my job at Columbia, is a gift of life in the last decades. but it is not easily learned. . . . But sometimes, the only way to live is to get out, or at least seriously to contemplate getting out, doing the impossible,flinging the conventional tea.

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