60 quotes
I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)
Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth.
The Obstacle Race (1979)
The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it.
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equalling Hals at his best, had been discovered.
The Obstacle Race (1979)
Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?
The Whole Woman (1999)
Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's.
The Whole Woman (1999)
Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
The Female Eunuch (1970)
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984)