“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat in...”

“In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would...”

“I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to k...”

“A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.”

“A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.”

“Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.”

“Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its na...”

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

“Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.”

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and t...”

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, bu...”

“I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution ...”