“Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it & pass on.”

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.” – Socrates (470-399 B.C.) “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t

The sexuality doesn’t end. It really doesn’t. You’re sexual your whole life, if you’re a sexual person.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.

In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.

You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can’t function without it.

If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

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.

We want flesh, flesh for fantasy.

Inordinate love for the flesh is cruelty, because under the appearance of pleasing the body, we kill the soul.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

We are more than just flesh and bones. There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure. We can’t find it. With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there.

In a fleshly tomb, I am buried above ground.

Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh.

He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!