What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a fog. I had so many complicated feelings I couldn't understand.

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.

Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

I grew up with a lot of Muslim friends, and the whole idea of revelation has been a lifelong interest of mine.

I remember as a kid watching TV and seeing Mel Blanc doing his voices and Paul Winchell doing his ventriloquism and thinking, 'Those guys are having a good time. I want to do that.'

Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

Being vulnerable has always been my way of dealing with my grief, from the beginning. Even before I knew I was that way, I cried it out all the time. I expressed my feelings.

Those gifts are ever the most acceptable which the giver makes precious. [Lat., Acceptissima semper munera sunt auctor quae pretiosa facit.]

Her many achievements will be appreciated more as time goes on.

I love challenging the status quo.