Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.
I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxicati...
Harriet’s parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind...
As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical — a man wouldn’t use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exc...
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a million-fold the age of the Earth. But these same diviners, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when...
It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodit...
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
[I wrote] '...letters designed to hide behind.
[...] students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone...
Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.’ He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. ‘What positi...
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pa...
We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from cho...
They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity a...
The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an...
The thought [behind the Golden Notebook] was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young, black, white, men, women, capitalism, socialism: t...