Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
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.
The journey is over. Love to all.
Today’s shocks are tomorrow’s conventions.
You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care.
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.
That is the point of quotations. One can use another’s words to be insulting.
Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.
One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one’s hands off the beastly drains.
Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes...
Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.
A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don’t feel like it.
Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can’t afford is habit.
Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.
To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.
Today’s youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role in the rat-race: that of the rat.
Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.
We women have lived too much with closure: “If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job” – there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.
To continue what one had been doing – which was Dante’s idea of hell – is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one’s sixties.
With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness – learn something new.
Many of us feel alone and assaulted by the meaninglessness of what we are doing. But, at such times, we are doing; the problem is not a lack of activity with a point, but rather questions about the point of the activity.