“Now that I'd experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I'd become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you've accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.”

“Sometimes all you’ve accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.”

“There is no greater catalyst for change in a man than a woman. To love a woman is to become a new kind of man, in one direction or another. A woman holds sway over all. The right woman can assume command of your every part of your being, both body and soul. Her conquest will be total.”

“Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?”

“It was all very well being in love with the memory of a woman, but loving a woman without her memories was simply torture.”

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”