“Childless people are always expected to explain themselves, although it would never occur to anyone to ask a woman why she became a mother (and to insist on getting good reasons)”

“The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion...”

“Increased responsibility for babies and young children has proved just as restrictive, if not more so, than sexism in the home or in the workplace.”

“Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands.”

“For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.”

“The message is clear: a good mother breast feeds. Significantly, this good mother shares a sociocultural profile with women in other developed countries: she is over thirty, is a high earning profe...”

“When we have to make a list of exceptions to apply a model of womanhood, it is good to ask whether that model holds much meaning.”

“the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wound...”

“You ride as a man, fight as a man, and you think as a man-""I think as a human being," she retorted hotly. "Men don't think any differently from women- they just make more noise about being able to.”

“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.”