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

“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]”

“Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.”

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

“. . . for those retired, with too much time and no world, a world must be found, and not necessarily one that is heavily populated. One can join a group or work alone; the essential . . . is that the work be difficult, concentrated, and that definite progress can be measured . . . the purpose . . . is. . . to maintain a carefully directed intensity. . . . Here the question is one of time, and to what all that remaining time should be devoted. [pp. 45-46]”

“But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular and, despite the commonness of all people, a unique person in the way I perceive and think and appreciate, and I am sad that this particularity shall before too long be gone. This is not arrogance; it is the simple truth, known to anyone who has loved a person dead in the fullness of her life: what we miss is the particularity, that unique voice. [pp. 184-185]”

“All good marriages are remarriages.”