You are the instrument of your own illumination.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

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.

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

A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

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.

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!