Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.