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]

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.

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.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events.