“I find it strange that practicing law in a comfortable well-heated office is considered too demanding an occupation for women, yet laboring from dawn's first light in crowded, drafty, ill-lit sweatshops is not.”

“As a matter of fact, despite your obstinacy, your infernal prying, and the fact that you invariably blurt out whatever comes into your head, regardless of the consequences, I admit that there are times when I find you irresistible, too.' I stared in astonishment at Robert's back as he rose to pay the bill. What in heaven's name, I wondered, did he mean by that?”

“Gruffly, he cleared his throat. 'Don't take this as a blanket approval of your tactics, Sarah, but if I'm ever unfortunate enough to get in trouble with the law, I want you to represent me.'Before I could respond to this startling and totally out-of-the-blue compliment, he opened the door and was nudging me inside. I caught a quick glance of his face before he walked off toward the dining room. He was actually blushing!”

“Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point...' -- as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent.”

“Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas, terrapins, catfish--anything that didn't bite you first.”

“If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.”

“We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place -- we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else.”