• Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.
• Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
• You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
• The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
• Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
• Oh, because falling in love turns you into an immediate bore. And it's dreadful.
• Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says 'What would I do without you?' is already destroyed.
• The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
• Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
• If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
• English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.
• The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
• Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?
• It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent 'celibacy,' by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity 'backward.'
• Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
• Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
• I mean, in Britain it's two women a week killed by their partner. That's a shocking statistic.
• Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.
• There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
• Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
• Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
• Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through.
