“There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.”

“With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.”

“Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.”

“Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?”

“…hearts wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings.”

“Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.”

“Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent to war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable?”