A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee.
Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.
The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
I think that testosterone is a rare poison.
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.
Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.
If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.
Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.
We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require 'educational practices and socializing agents' even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.
Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.
English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.
Act quickly, think slowly.
Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.
Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.
The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.
The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn.
Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.
You're only young once, but you can be immature forever
Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.
Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.
Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws.
Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it.
. I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading. )
Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.
Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?
Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.
Security is the denial of life
Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage.
It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.
Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?
Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.
It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.
I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.
Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.
...the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood - if it makes you sick, you've got a long way to go, baby.
Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.
The patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden.
A housewife's work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.
The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.
If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.
Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.
It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks.
The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.
We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'.
It is agreed that 'girls take more bringing up' than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.
Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial.
