For many of us the initial feminist understanding came as a kind of explosion: shattering, scattering, everything tumbling about, the old world withi… - Vivian Gornick

One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

All my life I've made do with less, because 'stuff' makes me anxious.

I wish to see every feminist say to herself: 'Yes, the patriarchy has taken my life from me, but also I have given it. I am not going to waste the rest of it in an avalanche of reproach. I am going to fight the patriarchy, but my real energy goes to the hard, drudging work of making myself human—as well as humane. Men may have taken my life from me—but they cannot give it back to me. Only I can do that, fighting inch by inch to reverse the emotional habits of a lifetime.'