If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.

The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.

Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.

We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication.

All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.