A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.
Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary. to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
