“Our minds work alike, she thought. She had found her partner, her equal, the one to work and live and love with her. Her soulmate.”

“The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.”

“She had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her, like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the work “we” - and perhaps without intention - he had let her know that he loved her.”

“Living to an extraordinary age, she mourned them all equally as she buried her husband and, one by one, her children. In this suffering she found the best sort of perfection--the kind that never demands it of others.”

“The mother in her believed that the love she had for her daughter was safe from the mayhem of her mind, because it lived in her heart.”

“Vanda (as Dunayev): In our society, a woman's only power is through men. Her character is her lack of character. She's a blank, to be filled in my creatures who at heart despise her. I want to see what Woman will be when she ceases to be man's slave. When she has the same rights as he, when she's his equal in education and his partner in work. When she becomes herself. An individual.”