“The french language is emotive. The verbs are strong and definite. The nouns are masculine or french. I could never understand why the farm would be feminine yet the farmhouse masculine; the pear and apple trees masculine yet the fruit feminine.”

“Summertime in the french countryside is the smell of ripening fig trees and the taste of wild blackberries.”

“Learning a language happens in stages, and the first breakthrough is a limited understanding. Somehow the words began to make sense; I could not respond, yet I had a vague comprehension of what had been said.”

“Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.”

“There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

“We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.”

“Thus, gender ideology no only creates ides about femininity but it also shapes conceptions of masculinity.”