“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 tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rathe...”

“We are all looking for perfection in our lives, but the truth is, there is no perfect. Theres just better and worse. And for what we are in this world, not being perfect is the perfect thing.”

“Because I have an ideal to live up to. And I can't fall down in my own eyes!”

“The ideal is the enemy of the real.”

“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.”