What I have found in life-it makes me very sad-is that one friend sustains me in one direction, another in another direction. What's missing are the … - Diana Trilling

It seemed to me, ruled my writing, whatever its subject: my belief that even in an unsatisfactory society the individual is best defined by his social geography.

Love idealizes, or at least traditionally that has been one of the differential diagnoses: love idealizes, adds, but sex is just body meeting body, sometimes with love, sometimes with affection, sometimes with neither, just for the fun or satisfaction of it.

we may protest that women's small contribution to culture doesn't indicate a lack of capacity but merely reflects the way men have contrived things to be: we can blame women's small place in culture on culture. But this leaves unanswered the question of why it is that over so many hundreds of years women have consented to follow the male dictate and allowed men to fashion the culture according to male design. It also leaves unanswered the even more fundamental question of why it is that in every society which has ever been studied-so Margaret Mead tells us-whatever is the occupation of men has the greater prestige