“It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.”

If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it.

Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.

I look forward and see myself look back.

If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss.

Keeping a journal implies hope.

As long as I’m facing the right direction, it doesn’t matter the size of my steps.

People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn’t. Social attitudes don’t change in a straight line.

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.

The parity of women’s health. It’s very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.

Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.

When do any of us ever do enough?

Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing i could never have him.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

I do not believe in any religion, I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another.

That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club.