Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts.

Violence is not inevitable. I mean, the only inevitable form of violence is the kind that we understand, the only legitimate (if there can ever be legitimate violence) and that's self-defense.

You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

We choose to be writers because we don't want to talk.

I think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.