There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best. - Doris Lessing

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

But when you get down to it, it’s all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it — that’s arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren’t even honest enough to let yourself be what you are — everything’s divided off and split up. So what’s the use of patronising me and saying: You’re in a bad phase. If you’re not in a bad phase, then it’s because you can’t be in a phase, you take care to divide yourself into compartments. If things are a chaos, then that’s what they are. I don’t think there’s a pattern anywhere — you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren’t good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else. All the best people can be good to one other person or their families. But that’s egotism, it isn’t being good. We aren’t any better than the animals, we just pretend to be.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.