“Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.”

Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.

I understood somehow my mother’s frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn’t have a real use of her ability.

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can’t be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.

If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

When a great adventure is offered, you don’t refuse it.

Life’s not about sitting at home in front of the TV waiting for your life to begin. Get out there and take some chances.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

The soul’s first adventure is the fight between two ideas: the wish to return to earth in a human form, and the desire to feel the freedom of having no form.

I think it’s my adventure, my trip, my journey, and I guess my attitude is, let the chips fall where they may.

Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.