If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.