“Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.”

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.

Is suffering so very serious? …I’m referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It’s extremely painful… hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain… is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.

A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.

In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.

I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.

A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.

I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

I’m male gigolo. Professionally? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything professionally.

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.

Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy.

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.

The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.