“We’re involved with flower, fruit, grapevine.They speak more than the language of the year.Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears,and one perhaps that has the jealous shineOf the dead, those who strengthen the earth.What do we know of the part they assume?It’s long been their habit to marrow the loamwith their own free marrow through and through. Now the one question: Is it done gladly?The work of sullen slaves, does this fruitthrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters?Sleeping with roots, granting us only out of their surplus this hybrid made of mutestrength and kisses — are they the masters?”

“as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing-- yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves”

“Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

“My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.”

“Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing”

“Glam culture is ultimately rooted in obsession, and those of us who are truly devoted and loyal to the lifestyle of glamour are masters of its history. Or, to put it more elegantly, we are librarians.”