The most obvious ones inspiring me are probably women in political life. There are also many women in artistic endeavors, but if they're painters, you don't necessarily see them, or if they're actors, you see the role they're playing. In political life, you see women of enormous courage and smarts and humor, and that releases the talent, especially in little girls who are watching.

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

We're changing ourselves to fit the world instead of changing the world to fit women.

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.

Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?

Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.