How? Well, if a girl has had enough of every man who exists, her only remaining desire could be for a man who doesn't exist at all…

Instead of inspiring the gallant attentions which other women seek, she made men dream,

Every age but ours has had its model, its ideal. All of these have been given up by our culture; the saint, the hero, the gentleman, the knight, the mystic. About all we have left is the well-adjusted man without problems, a very pale and doubtful substitute.

The Ideal Man of the eighteenth century was the Rationalist; of the seventeenth, the Christian Stoic; of the Renaissance, the Free Individual; of the Middle Ages, the Contemplative Saint. And what is our Ideal Man? On what grand and luminous mythological figure does contemporary humanity attempt to model itself? The question is embarrassing. Nobody knows. And, in spite of all the laudable efforts of the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation to fabricate an acceptable Ideal Man for the use of Ministers of Education, nobody, I suspect, will know until such time as a major poet appears upon the scene with the unmistakable revelation. Meanwhile, one must be content to go on piping up for reason and realism and a certain decency.

Cinderella, Snow White, or Red Riding Hood wasn’t our role models. We were taught from a very young age that girls need not be saved, that they could be heroes, protagonists of their own stories. Girls are not inferior to men, not in this generation or the ones before it.”

A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.

But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.

As a young girl, I thought that being in love with the man I married would guarantee a life of eternal joy. I soon learned that there weren't too many

Women want the fairytale. Not all women, of course, but most women grow up dreaming about the kind of man who would risk everything for them, even knowing they might get hurt.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

Through all those years Marcelle had confused Yoel with the imaginary heroes that her sad eyes cut out of the romances she read... and she realized that all through the past years she had merely travelled over the road map of the land of love, never in the land itself.

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will,and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is their nature to live fir others;to make complete abnegation of themselves,and to have no life but in their affections.

Did I say imaginary? Well yes. Human men are not like that.