The demonstrations are always early in the morning, at six o'clock. It's wonderful, because I'm not doing anything at six anyway, ...so why not demonstrate?... When you've written to your president, to your congressman, to your senator and nothing, nothing has come of it, you take to the streets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking ...about leaving--instead of actually getting up and leaving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only th...ing that endears us to our friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for... passion?... All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf c...alls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier ... to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writin...g, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultane...ously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops--in general, doing everything men do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The AIDS plague has so fed into America's current need to disown the sexual revolution that it has been hard to determine whether ...the new disease is just a convenient excuse or truly a new Black Death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »