“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin orcircles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwiseperfect pictur...”

“Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and b...”

“Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-res...”

“It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.”

“How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as h...”

“Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with ...”

“Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, ...”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

“I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of something that meaningful. I wanted to have something I was so passionate about that I'd be willing to risk everything for it. I wanted to know that ...”

“Do it with passion or not at all.”