“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”

Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.

We choose to be writers because we don’t want to talk.

Women must have seats at the table because peace is too crucial to be left only to the politicians or only to the male half of our world.

Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children, parasites.

The voting booth is the only place that a pauper equals a billionaire, and any woman equals any man.

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

[on sexual politics] The Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.

Whenever one person stands up and says, “Wait a minute, this is wrong,” it helps other people do the same.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

If what’s inside your dreams wasn’t already real inside you, you couldn’t even dream it.

I don’t like writing. I like having written.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

Sharing your emotions with paper is so much more comforting than sharing with someone else.

There is a song for every emotion.

You can’t control other’s emotions so focus on your own.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. We become closed – not only to people’s pain – but also their happiness.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

It is harder to fight pleasure than to fight emotion.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.