Mycenas, Greece -20071. “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.”
2. ”And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money.”
3. “At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”
4. ”Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.”
5. “Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads”.
6. “Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.”
7. "Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed."
8. "If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all."
9. “If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
10. ”I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change.... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back. “
11. "Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?"
12. ”I want to understand the steep thing
that climbs ladders in your throat.
I can't make sense of you.
Everywhere I look you're there--
a vast landmark, a volcano
poking its head through the clouds,
Gulliver sprawled across Lilliput.
I climb into your eyes, looking.
The pupils are black painted stage flats.
They can be pulled down like window shades.
I switch on a light in your iris.
Your brain ticks like a bomb.
In your offhand, mocking way
you've invited me into your chest.
Inside: the blur that poses as your heart.
I'm supposed to go in with a torch
or maybe hot water bottles
& defrost it by hand
as one defrosts an old refrigerator.
It will shudder & sigh
(the icebox to the insomniac).
Oh there's nothing like love between us.
You're the mountain, I am climbing you.
If I fall, you won't be all to blame,
but you'll wait years maybe
for the next doomed expedition.”
13. "Jealousy is all the fun you think they had."
14. "Men and women, women and men; it will never work."
15. “Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.”
16. “My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.”
17. "No one to blame! That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame."
18. “Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.”
19. ”Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”
20. “There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness (…)"
21. "The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
22. "To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives."
23. "True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen."
24. ”Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.”
25. ”You see an awful lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.”
