Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

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

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

And there isn't any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn't seem to be any moral place for flesh.