What we have to watch out for, to keep from being suckered in, is when someone purports to explain not one particular concrete thing, but the way in … - Joanna Russ

This isn't something I feel the need to apologize for. The idea that every year or two years you're supposed to turn out these new books that are all going to be wonderful and commercially popular is a misguided notion that commerce has foisted upon us. The writing process has a rhythm all its own, and at least for me the rhythm is absolutely different for every book.

Anger is a necessity. It's part of all radicalism. When Marxism isn't second-generation, academic, and establishment-theoretical, its motive is sheer fury. What else? When groups get past a certain point of oppression, it's a revelation to be angry. Prior to that you'd go through a stage of feeling you have to be so moral, so good, that anger seems inappropriate; you think you shouldn't get angry. Eventually you get to a place where you can more honestly express that anger, and that's fine. Mother Jones said, "Farmers in this state are raising too much corn and not enough hell!" There's a point where it's essential to get in touch with anger in situations where people or structures are dumping on you. You need this anger to resist looking at the structure and saying, "It's us, it's our fault"; or "What they're saying is true, we must be wrong." If you lose touch with this outrage, you wind up forgetting what you were mad about in the first place; you start feeling that you'd really rather not get involved, that you can't change things, that it's no use. Oppression is always mystifying and confusing. Lying, really.

We may not, by the way, be the only sapient beings in the galaxy-in fact the odds are heavily against such an occurrence-which probability sometimes gave me inexplicable comfort in the midst of the combined horrors of adolescence and the ghastliness of growing up to the tune of "Love and marriage / Go together like a horse and carriage," illegal abortion, and all the other viciousness we endured because we were young. There seem to be plenty of folks now who find that smothering, coercive, conformist, witch-hunting, red-baiting era an object of nostalgia.
They can have it.