Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.

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.

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.

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

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.

Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one.

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

Opportunities happen when timing, connects, and personalities converge.

Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.

I’m curious about why there’s so much honor given to death, when there is no honor in losing someone you love.

Enjoy every blessing you can get from ever setback and quickly move on. Don't dwell too much on a setback. Don't miss out other blessings ahead...

I think sometimes women are not driven by the same, albeit, testosterone power thing that pushes men to get into politics.

You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.

And we support Senator Joseph Lieberman, that it's time for our country to consider a military preemptive strike against Iran if they will not yield to diplomacy

There is no one who can give you wiser advice than you can give yourself: you will never make a slip, if you listen to your own heart.

For lawless joys a bitter ending waits.

I went off to fight some battle that I'd invented inside me.