Of all the men I slept with in my studio-bed on Gay Street (and there were a lot: I stopped counting) I liked Bill Mangold the best. Until I began to… - Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.

To marry a man without loving him, which was what I had just done, not really perceiving it, was a wicked action, I saw. Stiff with remorse and terror, I lay under the thin blanket through a good part of the night; as far as I could tell from what seemed a measureless distance, my untroubled mate was sleeping.

When we pass from "I ought to do this" to "You think I ought to do this," it seems to us at first that we have weakened the imperative; actually, by externalizing it, we have made it unanswerable, for it is only ourselves that we can come to terms with.