“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
“The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.”
“Before marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were hers.”
“She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”
“In the most common fantasy of ideal love, [...], a woman can only unleash her desire in the hands of a man whom she imagines to be more powerful, who does not depend upon her for his strength. [...] The boundedness and limits within which one can surrender, and in which one can experience abandonment and creativity, are sought in the ideal lover. (p. 120)”
“Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.”