“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”

“Those were her best days, although there was always something feckless about her, something so slack and almost fearful in her too frequent smile, so that when you saw Mignon being happy, you alway...”

“And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just...”

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of a...”

“She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movement under her eyelids, and t...”

“How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

“Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give youa closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest, never forgive a man who wants to save you.”

“Sexuality is not meant to be this way - an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is mean...”

“Michael, some people are just confused about their sexuality, trying to come to terms with it. There are others who are bisexual too; it doesnt mean she was trying to deceive you. She must have jus...”

“Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and littl...”

“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.”