“Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to ...”

“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.”

“A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a t...”

“My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my ...”

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”

“So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.”

“The patrists poison themselves. The matrists tend to decay, which is merely another kind of poison.”

“Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when ...”

“Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as h...”

“Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with ...”

“Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, ...”