Marriage is a very strange thing. It's a very public institution, it's meant to tell the world that two people are going to live together, to declare that their children will be legal, that these children can inherit their property. It's meant for social living, to ensure that some rules are observed, so that men and women don't cross the lines drawn from them. At the same time, marriage is an intensely private affair, no outsider will know the state of some one else's marriage. It's a closed room, a locked room...

It's not just that life is cruel, but that in the very process of our birth we submit to life's cruelty

Marriage is a very strange thing. It's a very public institution, it's meant to tell the world that two people are going to live together, to declare that their children will be legal, that these children can inherit their property. It's meant for social living, to ensure that some rules are observed, so that men and women don't cross the lines drawn from them. At the same time, marriage is an intensely private affair, no outsider will know the state of some one else's marriage. It's a closed room, a locked room...

Things can never be as they were. It's astonishing how we comment on change, as if change is something remarkable. On the contrary, not to change is unnatural, against nature.

I don't like to call myself a feminist writer. I say I'm a feminist, but I don't write to propagate an ism.

. . . a friend . . . showed me the kitchen in her new home with the words, "This is my office." I knew what she meant. This is where I do the work I want to, the work I like and enjoy.

Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real you never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.