A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it..

a revolutionary marriage ... [is] one in which both partners have work at the center of their lives and must find a delicate balance that can support….

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epith….

Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it..

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told..

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist..

. . . a relationship has a momentum, it must change and develop, and will tend to move toward the point of greatest commitment..

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard..

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it..

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong..

We in middle age require adventure..

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit..

Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if ….

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first ….

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar..

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes..

To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, femini….

Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment a….

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world..

Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you've received a belly blow, it's likely to be followed by a right to the jaw..

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirme….