When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

I hated being "Mrs." from the first second each time. I didn't know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt. I hated being one half of a couple, without understanding that it wasn't the husband or the man I hated, it was situation, the identity.

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

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

No man worth his salt does not wish to be a husband and father; yet no man is raised to be a husband and father and no man would ever conceive of those relationships as instruments of his prime function in life. Yet every woman is raised, still, to believe that the fulfillment of these relationships is her prime function in life and, what's more, her instinctive choice.

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.

Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.