Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.