... the whole sickening trickery in life -- the idea that one cannot fight for one's humanity without, ironically, losing it ... that trickery is the real enemy and the very essence of the thing we must continually be on our guard against.

Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.

Of course love is a force in life. People will go on falling in love forever. And more important, sexual infatuation will enrapture everyone. Otherwise, no babies!

for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.

For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.