the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.

Perhaps that is what love is -- the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

I believe we need literature, which, by allowing us to experience more fully, to imagine more fully, enables us to live more freely.

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.