When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.

You can't imbibe someone's success by f*cking them.

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

[T]here is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).