“Any woman whose I.Q. hovers above her body temperature must be a feminist.”

“The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation.”

“The woman in whose body I had grown, in whose house I’d been raised was, in some vital ways, a stranger to me. I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl with the pasted on smiles and the folding tab dresses.”

“Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.”

“It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs.”

“It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for any body who asks her.”