When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.

We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes.

The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.

Research is the live heart of the scientific life ... Greatness of position, respect for past accomplishments, the Nobel Prize itself -- none of these can compensate for the loss of vitality only research provides.

Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that

self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.