I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11) - Marge Piercy

From the third grade on, women are trained to mistrust their natural bodies and to try to make them conform with body types belonging to two percent of the population.

I think poetry ultimately is a more communal activity than fiction, but I love both equally.

Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat. (p282)