Nothing is more democratic, less judgmental, than water. Water doesn’t care whether flesh is withered or fresh; it caresses aged flesh and firm flesh with equal love.
To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals — and critics of the Women’s Movement.
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
my love of water … is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position – I enter a fugue state – but I cannot bear to bury my face in water).
Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God’s chosen.
It’s the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive – it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.
