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 against those who have taken our Eden from us.

To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.

The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

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

God urges us to bring our concerns to Him—not just petitions about our own needs, but also intercessions for others. [The apostle] Paul said . . . “Brothers, pray for us” [1 Thessalonians 5:25 NIV].

An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.

We can improve our relationships with others by leaps and bounds if we become encouragers instead of critics.

Celibacy is exhausting.

I've decided to do it, for the pure and simple reason that I just think it's the right thing to do.

I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else.

Let us have the luxury of silence.

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.

Becoming an artist cannot be taught. A degree and diligence is not a guarantee that one can become an 'artist.

Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow, And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow; Thou canst help time to furrow me with age, But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage.