World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories - at all social levels - which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?