Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living.

power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.

Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

The greatest barrier to women's advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don't belong out there.

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?