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

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.

Our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.

It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.

Love is love, but marriage is an investment.

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

I hope we don’t have to keep going back over the same territory and winning the same rights over and over again. The battle for birth control. The battle for abortion.

Of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

There are so many elements that make a good film. You need a great director who’s driving it.

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health, or of nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as among the sick.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and respect of self, in turn, is the chief element in courage.

The element of change has been the thing, really. We put out the first one, then the second… then a third LP totally different from them. It’s the reason we were able to keep it together.