Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that should….

I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model,….

Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous a….

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence,….

To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living ….

Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness..

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the….

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished..

We all grew up so utterly vulnerable, enthralled by romantic love as we knew it. First of all, it was pounded into you every which way that you've go….

The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The p….

Adorable in her not-very-bright submissiveness, charming in her childlike delight in shiny floors, even forgivable in her spiteful competition for th….

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge.

No man worth his salt does not wish to be a husband and father; yet no man is raised to be a husband and father and no man would ever conceive of tho….

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of mys….

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety..

You are the instrument of your own illumination..

A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not th….

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pa….

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply u….

Every work [of literature] has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emoti….

When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, a….