Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.

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

I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.

I grew up thinking there was one unpardonable sin – to be boring.

The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.

After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.

Awareness of time as flying has some advantages; it precludes boredom, for one thing. It matters little that younger people find older people boring or slow. Older people have a right to resist being rushed, to stand and stare at the fragile world that has become so unspeakably dear to them. For the lucky ones, who will not have to leave while they are still in love with life, there will come a later time when that passion too will fade, but while one is still possessed by that great tenderness, it must be yielded to.