“A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”

“All people imitate their creations. Today's fashions imitate our principal creations, which are electronic. Women imitate light bulbs or TV sets; their clothes glow, their hair is luminous. They radiate. They can be turned on and off.”

“But even now, especially now, it seems to me that women have a strength about them that men never had. And I wonder how did men always get portrayed in the movies and such as the strong ones? How did it come to be that women are made to look like the weak ones who need protectin'? Truth is, it's men who need the protectin'. Really they do. Women have the strong thing inside of them and the can get through anything. They just can. They're used to pain of child birthing - pain no man knows - and some women being battered around and not treated right through all the centuries and having to learn at a real young age how to stay alive on the inside when the outside is being hurt real bad. Most all women know that. But men. Those poor men. They just don't have the inside strength the women do. It's harder for men to feel pain.”

“Why do magazines do this to women? It'sall about creating insecurity. Trying to make women feel like they're not good enough. And when women don't feel like they're good enough, guess what? Men win. That's how they keep us down.”

“How attraction works, making one's body almost painfully alive and one's thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters.”

“Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?”