14 quotes
Knowledge brings pain and anxiety, exhilaration and an undreamt-of courage.
If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001)
The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not.
The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)
inner freedom inevitably releases one into the larger world.
Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making.
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader (2020)
Thinking clearly is, I believe, the road to freedom. It was in the spirit of that feminist essential that I have tried to write.
Essays in feminism (1978)
Vast internal changes must occur in women in which old responses, old habits, old emotional convictions are examined under a new light: the light of consciousness.
Essays in feminism (1978)
...to have anything full strength (especially something which outlives itself) is to insure increasing isolation; and isolation is an outrage to the emotions and a bewilderment to the soul.
Jack Kerouac: ‘The Night and What It Does to You (2020)
This is the intimacy that will bind us all our lives, holding us forever to the task implicit in all love relations: how to connect yet not merge, how to respond yet not be absorbed, how to detach but not withdraw.
The End of The Novel of Love (1997)
All my life I've made do with less, because 'stuff' makes me anxious.
Interview (2015)
The feminist perspective has grown immeasurably throughout American life because feminist consciousness has thrived and become ever more sophisticated whereas feminist dogma has shriveled and become ever more parochial.
Essays in feminism (1978)
Collectively speaking, if we chart the internal mood of every successful movement for social integration we find that, ironically, with each advance made it is anger—not hope, much less elation—that deepens in the petitioners at the gate. Ironic but not surprising: to petition repeatedly is to be reminded repeatedly that one is not wanted, never had been, never will be.
I want to dramatise it not moralise over it. I didn't want to lecture or keep pointing things out to the reader, which is what a polemic does.
Interview with Verso Books (2021)
There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.
The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)