How could one create life with someone who represented death? - Erica Jong

Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom -- but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.