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

I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.

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.

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

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

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