We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.

I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.

The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.