Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.

Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

Old age is life's parody.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.