Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]
Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.
You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support both together and each individually.
Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.
. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment.
Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.
Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.
