You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality.

It's a shame for women's history to be all about men--first boys, then other boys, then men men men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over whenever they occurred. (Our teachers deplored this and added extra units about social history and protest movements, but that was still the message of the books.)

I wasn't brought up to be dazzled by money or fame.