I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before-gives a place to every human gift.

Through a grandmother's voice and hands the end of life is known at the beginning.

to the extent that either sex is disadvantaged, the whole culture is poorer, and the sex that, superficially, inherits the earth, inherits only a very partial legacy. The more whole the culture, the more whole each member, each man, each woman, each child will be.

It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.

I approached the idea of college with the expectation of taking part in an intellectual feast. ... In college, in some way that I devoutly believed in but could not explain, I expected to become a person.

Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them.