“I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.”

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.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.

You began your journey here as a pup. Now you must find your way back. A new quest, a new start.

You begin to understand that warriorship is a path or a thread that runs through your entire life. It is not just a technique that you apply when you are unhappy or depressed. Warriorship is a continual journey. To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life. That is the warrior’s discipline

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.

I began writing early – very, very early… I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, ‘Now I’m a writer.’ I’ve always been a writer.

And so we remained till the red of the dawn began to fall through the snow gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror. But when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again.

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.