Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

One does not know where love will take you.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.