The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities.

I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.

Act quickly, think slowly.

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.