“Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather tha...”

“I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.”

“There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the ser...”

“Id been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. Thats what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didnt say much, I listened.”

“If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.”

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we sm...”

“People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.”

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

“The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”