“It is assured that men of all ages imagine a woman naked when they first meet.”

“Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.”

“When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.”

“At what age did men mature? If ever? And at what age did a woman cease having to deal with men acting as if they owned the right to lustfully indulge in a woman, be it with his eyes or hands?There was more to a woman than a womb and breasts.”

“It's not very easy to grow up into a woman. We are always taught, almost bombarded, with ideals of what we should be at every age in our lives: "This is what you should wear at age twenty", "That is what you must act like at age twenty-five", "This is what you should be doing when you are seventeen." But amidst all the many voices that bark all these orders and set all of these ideals for girls today, there lacks the voice of assurance. There is no comfort and assurance. I want to be able to say, that there are four things admirable for a woman to be, at any age! Whether you are four or forty-four or nineteen! It's always wonderful to be elegant, it's always fashionable to have grace, it's always glamorous to be brave, and it's always important to own a delectable perfume! Yes, wearing a beautiful fragrance is in style at any age!”

“It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.”