“As long as there have been women," Mom told me, "there have been ways to punish them for being women.”

“It's not new, our valuation of young female people for how they can serve, satisfy, and satiate. Our girls are both the platter and the meal, and we eat them up--we eat their meat, we lap up their ...”

“There is no such thing as unconditional love," my mother told me. "I could stop loving you at any time.”

“You can't make people love you. Love isn't something you earn, or something you deserve. Love just is. Or it isn't. Anyway, there are more important things than love. Like service. Being of service...”

“I'll walk as fast as I want, and I will take breaks whenever I feel like it. There is no one to follow, no one to keep up with. There's just me and this one beautiful day, this one moment, right he...”

“That's who unconditional love is for - dogs and their masters, fools and their gods.”

“A woman's orgasm is such a fragile thing, dependant as much upon her mind as on her clitoris.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”