“Men are not listeners . . . They hear what they expect to hear, or want to hear, or are certain they will hear, and women, being supple creatures trained to please, have often told them what we women knew would satisfy them. [p. 167]”

“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]”

“Today women live long into their children's adult lives . . . too little is made of the pleasure we women feel in conversing with our grown children, and in allowing ourselves, from time to time, to think of them as friends. I have been fortunate in having children with whom conversation is possible; the sheerest pleasure here, for me, has been in meeting with them each alone . . . [p. 185]”

“If an animal is designed by nature to have claws it ought to keep them, and if men come with quirks that they are incapable of changing, well, a certain amount of quietude and even peace can be achieved by just realizing that it's all inherent in the beast. [p. 173]”

“Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together. [p. 23]”

“Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.”

“What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be.”