“We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.

Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.

if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

We didn’t invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead.

Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.

Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology and women’s studies – to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.

Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.