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

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

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.

To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job" -- there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.

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