Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.